


Lazarus

by Lysandra



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Dark Comedy, Gen, Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-02-18 15:53:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18702736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysandra/pseuds/Lysandra
Summary: Iris's containment procedures are loosened for the first time since the disbandment of Mobile Task Force Omega-7. When she discovers a chance at escape, she comes very close to losing whatever is left of her life - and her soul.





	1. Special Privileges

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this in 2012 and recently decided to rewrite it for fun. Not posted on the mainsite for a variety of reasons. I haven't read the Resurrection canon yet, but I think it might bear some resemblances, purely by coincidence. This story will contain minor body horror and some gore. Individual chapters will have notes about those.

Iris liked puzzles. 

She liked the challenge of it, working out how to rotate the pieces in her mind until the full picture snapped into focus, and she liked that her efforts led to a very simple and satisfying result. She’d been good enough at puzzles as a child for it to be impressive to her parents’ friends, a party trick talent, but as an adult it wasn’t a particularly interesting skill. Fortunately, no one but the bored technician behind the security camera was watching her now, so it didn’t really matter. Tongue between her teeth, Iris snapped another piece of the border in. Very satisfying. This one was, according to the box, a picture of a boat gliding peacefully across a lake, something that Iris would never again see in person.

The puzzles were part of her Enrichment, which consisted of marginally intellectually stimulating hobbies that she was allowed access to, presumably to keep her from going entirely insane. Probably for the same reason, she was given weekly interviews with a Foundation psychologist, who was clearly very disinterested in her job and the piddling amount of information that still had to be dragged out of Iris. Well, the interviews had been weekly for a long time. More recently, they were twice-weekly. Perhaps the Foundation was on a human rights kick. The thought struck Iris as incredibly funny.

She was working on a more long-form joke involving the Foundation personified as a person attempting self-improvement when the door to her cell slid open. Well. That was unusual. No one ever, ever came to her room except to deliver food or to fetch her for her appointments with the psychologist. But lunch was usually delivered through a slit in the door, which meant that this was an unscheduled visit. Iris, on her belly on the floor, stared distrustfully up at the unfamiliar freckled face of a young, curly-haired man in Foundation standard-issue scrubs. They were like the ones Iris herself wore, but in a more flattering color.

“Hello, one-oh-five,” said the man. Iris hated him already. “I have some good news!” He was clearly very nervous and clumsily brought his hands together in a pantomime of glee. They forgot the clipboard, Iris thought. You can’t look authoritative without a clipboard. But maybe they were going for trustworthy, wanting her to think he didn’t know what he was-

“Since you’ve been so cooperative for some time now, you are no longer classed as a run risk. Under new protocol, this means that you are eligible to enjoy your meals in the main canteen.”

“Oh,” said Iris. She found herself wishing the man would leave so she could finish her puzzle. It was a new one, after all.

“So, uh.” The freckled man’s voice cracked. He had to be younger than her. “If you want to come with me...I will be your escort to and from the canteen. Don’t worry, though. I won’t hover too much while you’re eating.” He tried a playful wink. It went very badly.  
It was then that the full ramifications of the situation hit Iris: here was this man, standing in the open doorway, telling her that she was allowed to go out. After ten years of confinement, it was certainly suspicious, but wouldn’t going with him tell her more about what they might be up to? And there were people out there, bright light and cafeteria smells…

“Okay,” said Iris. She shuffled awkwardly to her feet and glanced down sadly at her abandoned puzzle. Later, later.

“Oh, perfect. Right this way.” Freckles turned on his heel and, she noticed, walked very slowly to ensure that Iris was within grabbing distance as she followed after him. The door slid shut behind them with a flick of his badge. Whelp, no going back now. They walked down the sterile, fluorescent-lit hallway with Freckles glancing nervously over his shoulder at the pale, thin woman trailing after him like a ghost. There were only two armed guards in the hall, the bare minimum for the low-risk humanoids. The canteen, it turned out, was only two hallways away from the ward that held Iris. It wasn’t very exciting, as far as journies went, but it was definitely novel. Freckles pushed open a final set of double doors, and there it was: the very picture of an institutional cafeteria, complete with exhausted people drinking coffee and a strange, hard-to-place odor.

Iris took a step, following Freckles through the door, and then paused. She realized her heart was beating against the inside of her ribcage. There were...a lot of people in here. Well, ten or twelve, but more than she’d seen in a long time, and they all looked up, briefly, at the sound of the door closing behind her. Staff exclusively, judging by the attire, unless some of them were skips like her. It didn’t seem likely; they all appeared to have badges. Iris started at the sudden deluge of accidental eye contact and took a half-step back, her heel colliding with the closed door. She felt a steadying hand on her elbow, and the unexpected contact did little to calm her fraying nerves. She jerked to the side with a sharp inhale, bringing her hands up to press her fingers against her temples.

“One-oh-five?” Oh, the nervous manner was definitely genuine.

“Fine,” said Iris. “Good. Great.”

“Great,” Freckles repeated, and swallowed. “You can get your meal over there-” he gestured to the bored person standing behind the standard-issue lunch line, which looked the same as the one at her old school except for the bulletproof glass, “and I’ll just come back in, oh, how about twenty minutes?”

“Yep,” said Iris. “Got it.” She stopped massaging her temples. _Keep it together or they’ll think you’re nuts._ She forced herself to breathe deep. _Okay, alright. Nobody’s looking, just cross the room._ She did, haltingly, feeling like a prey animal exposed on the savannah. The stern-faced woman in a hair net who stood waiting behind the lunch line looked at Iris blandly.

“They told me you were coming,” she said. “Standard humanoid rations. Just a moment.” The woman disappear briefly around a corner and returned with a tray of the same slop that Iris was usually fed: peas, carrots, boiled chicken. Perfectly nutritionally balanced and bland enough to make you weep. Iris reached across the counter and took the tray carefully. It felt even more lukewarm than usual.

“I love being a standard humanoid,” said Iris. It was meant as a joke, but it came out louder than she’d intended, and in complete monotone. There was a brief pause.

“Right,” said the lunch lady, raising an eyebrow. “Good for you.”

Iris turned carefully and surveyed the room, ready to strategize. Despite the sparse crowd, all of the tables were occupied by at least one person. And presumably more of them would arrive; it was still only eleven-thirty, according to the clock on the wall. She tried to gauge who would be the safest bet. There was an older woman with a neat manicure, drinking out of an opaque thermos. There was a heavy-set middle-aged man and his almost eerily identical coworker, engaged in animated conversation. There were a couple of vaguely familiar-looking white coats that Iris tried not to stare at too long. And there was a Middle-Eastern man in the corner, eating a truly depressing slab of meatloaf and notably being the only person in the room not shooting Iris sidelong glances when they thought she wasn’t looking.

But he was familiar, too. Wasn’t he? She’d seen him floating around the facility, back when she’d been allowed more freedom. He looked human (standard-issue) except for the fact that, just above the collar of his work coat, there was the glint of some kind of metal that seemed to be embedded in his skin. There was also an interesting tattoo of some kind on his forehead. Okay, looking like a good prospect. Sit by the other skip to deflect attention. Possibly trade war stories. Possibly. 

Iris drifted across the room and gingerly set her tray down on the man’s table before hesitantly sitting down across from him. It occurred to her that she should have asked if she could sit here, but what if he said no?

“Hi,” said Iris. “I’m Iris.”

The man looked up at her, face betraying no particular feeling about this situation. “Hello, Iris,” he said. Oh, no. Right back to the meatloaf. If he’d rather be paying attention to that than her, she had to be doing terribly.

“Who are you?” she asked. “It’s just I’ve seen you around and I know you’re not. Um, that you’re in containment and I guess we’re the only two allowed out- or are there more? I don’t know. Do you know?” The words fell out of her in a veritable flood. Once she’d started talking, it felt like it was difficult to stop. Ten years of unspoken words were on the tip of her tongue.

The man examined Iris placidly. “I am called Cain,” he said, and Iris noticed a trace of an accent. “There are a small number of anomalous individuals allowed access to the canteen at present.” He had very intense blue eyes, Iris noticed. She tried not to stare at the mark on his forehead. There was a sort of churning going on in the back of her mind that she locked away to deal with later, in the safety of her room.

“Cool,” said Iris. “Special privileges.” She swung her legs, meal forgotten. “Did you get out for good behavior, too?”

Cain, seemingly resigned to this conversation, set down his fork. “No,” he said. He did not elaborate. Iris realized that there was something slightly odd about the way he spoke, accent aside. It was clinical, almost cold. Maybe they had him on drugs, the good ones. Well, Iris herself wasn’t exactly the epitome of social grace at the moment. 

As if in a self-fulfilling prophecy, Iris opened her mouth and blurted, “Is your name actually Cain, or is it Ca-yeen and no one pronounces it correctly so you’ve just given up?” Oh, god. She needed sensitivity training. She needed to leave. But, surprisingly, Cain gave a tiny half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“The second one, actually. It makes no difference to me now.”

Iris huffed out a breath. “Oh.” Cain made very direct, penetrating eye contact, but it was difficult to tell what he was thinking. It made her slightly nervous. It occurred to Iris that eating while talking was a very normal, standard humanoid behavior, and that it might help grease the wheels, so to speak. She forced down a mouthful of chicken and used the time it took to chew to think about what to say next.

“How long have you been here?”

“Quite a long while.”

“How come they gave you that coat?”

“I assist Foundation staff with archiving information, and they prefer that I blend in when I move about the facility.”

“You work here? For them?”

“I’m not formally employed, but I do, as I said, assist with archiving.”

Iris chewed a baby carrot thoughtfully. She swallowed. “So you’re a slave?” she said.

Cain’s face changed; he looked surprised. Maybe “surprised” was even a bit strong; “stunned” might have been the better word for it. _Iris, you idiot. You don’t call strangers slaves!_ Iris seriously considered standing up and fast-walking out of the room.

“I’m sorry,” she gulped, “I didn’t mean-”

“That,” said Cain, “is an interesting philosophical question.”

A period of time passed in silence while Iris made some progress on her food and tried to forget about her blunder. Cain, she noticed, had not returned to his meatloaf. Oh, no. She’d made him lose his appetite. And of course he felt like he had to stay there until Iris was done so he wouldn’t look like a jerk for not wanting to be subjected to her.

“You’re very polite,” said Iris, working up another surge of gumption, stirring her peas around to avoid looking at Cain’s face.

“I know.”

“I feel like I can’t stop talking, or saying whatever comes into my head. I just haven’t been able to have a normal conversation since- since I…since about ten years ago. Wow, that’s a long time. It doesn’t even feel that long. But everything blends together down here.” By this point, Iris had successfully mashed her peas into a green paste. “I don’t know. Let’s talk about music. Do you know anything about music?”

“The 2015 MTV Video Music Award for ‘Best Rock Video’ was awarded to Fall Out Boy, for their song ‘Uma Thurman’,” said Cain, as though he were reading the information off the back of a cereal box. Iris blinked at him.

“How do you know that? Are you allowed to read the newspaper?”

A tiny furrow appeared between Cain’s brows. “Yes. I don’t recall restrictions on information about current events being part of your containment procedures.”

“It’s not. They just don’t want me getting ideas, I guess. How do you know about my procedures? Oh, yeah. Archivist. Wow. You must have all the top secrets.”

Cain shrugged noncommittally. 

“I should shut up ‘cause we’re being recorded, huh?”

“That would be...wise.”

Iris sighed. She was starting to run out of steam.

“I understand that containment can be a difficult experience for some anomalous individuals,” said Cain. “I myself found it initially...restrictive.”

“How long did it take you to get used to being locked inside all day?”

Cain didn’t answer.

It was then that Iris noticed Freckles awkwardly trying to get her attention by waving from across the room. Had it been twenty minutes already?

“Oh,” said Iris. “There’s my handler. I’d better go. Just one more thing. You keep up with what’s going on in the world. Are My Chemical Romance still together?”

Cain hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “They are not.”

Iris highed heavily. It felt like what was left of her soul was draining out of her body. “I can’t have anything, can I?” she said. She stood up and stuffed her cutlery back onto it with a clatter.

“Goodbye, Iris,” said Cain.

“Goodbye, Cayeen,” she said, and went to dump her tray in the bin marked “DIRTY” before returning to her escort. Dr. Lindstrom (Iris made sure to read the badge on the lanyard around his neck this time) gave her a hopeful smile. 

“Alright?” he said. “Did you have a nice conversation with seventy-three?”

“Sort of,” said Iris.

“Good, good! We would definitely encourage forming a professional but friendly relationship. But professional, of course.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if he’s down for friendly.”

“Yep!” said Lindstrom. “Alright, shall we…?” He gestured toward the door.

Iris followed Lindstrom back to her room deep in thought. She was fairly certain, however, that he’d taken her a different route than he had on the way there. It made her seethe. Couldn’t even take her to lunch without a thirteen-page protocol and at least two appendices of additional documentation.

They arrived back at her cell from the opposite direction they’d left, at which point Dr. Lindstrom fished a pen and a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket.  
“Just one last thing,” he said, flashing a smile at her. “We would love for you to rate your satisfaction with this enrichment experience.”

Once Iris had filled out the survey, she was alone again. She stood in the center of her little room, contemplating. This was the most interesting, the most strange, thing that had happened to her in years. It said a lot about her life that it felt like she’d been gifted with an enormous, intoxicating freedom. Her new acquaintance was strange, but there was also something oddly magnetic about Cain. She wondered if she’d be able to get him to answer any of her questions. She wondered what abilities he had. She wondered what in the actual hell a skip was doing as an archivist. She wondered why he seemed so cold, so heavy.

...Iris liked puzzles.


	2. A Working Relationship

Iris spent the rest of the afternoon pacing. She probably looked like a wild animal on the CCTV, but she was excited. Out of her cage - for a few hours a day, at least - and with a mystery to solve. She was so wound up that it made her slightly nauseous, and she spent at least twenty minutes sitting on the edge of her bed, taking deep breaths and trying not to be sick on her detergent-stiff non-skid socks.

When Dr. Lindstrom came to get her for dinner, she was fully recovered from her brief bout of malaise and got eagerly to her feet. Lindstrom had a clipboard this time, held awkwardly at his side.

“Up for round two? Yeah? Okay!” He beamed at her. It was very “guidance counselor”.

“Do I have to fill out the survey every time?” Iris asked, following him out of the room. It was more for the sake of having something to say than out of genuine curiosity; she got the impression her silence had spooked him before. How strange. She never would have guessed that one day she’d be someone - something - that people were scared of.

“No, no,” said Lindstrom, dress shoes clacking on the sterile linoleum. “Once a week or so should be fine. There’s no need to get crazy with it.” He adjusted the clipboard under his arm clumsily, and Iris noticed that the sheets of paper pinned to it were completely blank. 

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” said Iris. Lindstrom gave a high, nervous laugh.

“Um, that doesn’t really matter,” he said. She knew the answer, anyway. He was too soft to be a lifer. She’d give him a month and a half before he found a job somewhere else and vanished from her life. They always started the ones they weren’t sure about on the humanoid ward, and Iris had gotten good at telling which ones were right for the job.

Iris realized that the route they were taking was even more convoluted than the two she’d already walked. They wanted to make it as difficult as possible for her to memorize the layout, even if it was just a couple of hallways. 

“Can you tell me anything about Cain?” Iris asked softly.

“No, I can’t,” said Lindstrom. “Even if I knew anything, I couldn’t. Sorry.”

“Has he been here for ages?” Iris allowed her voice to weaken slightly and put on her best wide-eyed facial expression. “It’s just so hard to trust anyone with all these secrets…”

“He’s been here much longer than you, yeah,” said Lindstrom, eyeing her warily. Iris added a pathetic shoulder-hunch, flinching as though his suspicious gaze had scalded her. Lindstrom frowned, brow crumpling in obvious sympathy. Iris actually felt bad for him.

“It doesn’t really matter,” said Lindstrom, who had started to take longer, more urgent steps. “You don’t have to know a lot about someone unless you’re planning to have them arrested. Anyway! Here we are.” Lindstrom pointed at the double-doors to the canteen and adjusted his tie before walking off with a casual “Have fun!”. Iris pushed herself through the doors and heard his footsteps stop immediately. She smiled. Definitely a rookie. He hadn’t even turned the corner when he was pretending to leave.

Iris scanned the mess hall eagerly, but Cain was nowhere to be found. Worse, the room was much busier than last time. Day shift and night shift were in the process of trading off, probably, and the room was humming with activity. It was difficult to tell who might be watching her. The clock read six forty-five. Iris made her way over to the lunch line. There were people in front of her, now, paying for oily cafeteria food. She stood next to a young woman with bags under her eyes and a flower-shaped pin on her blouse and tried to look like she belonged there. She was now more conscious of the fact that her eye-catching blue scrubs were emblazoned with the Foundation’s logo on the front and back, along with her designated number and the word “SAFE” in bold print. And that she was the only person in the room not wearing shoes. Cain had shoes. Probably. She hadn’t thought to look at his feet.

A hand seized Iris’s upper arm. Heart in her throat, she turned to find her face inches from that of a man with a scraggly mustache and crooked, yellow teeth. A wave of sour breath hit her face. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he sneered. “How did you get out of containment?”

Iris’s throat moved, but her voice didn’t seem to want to work. “I- I’m-”

“Leave it alone, Jeremy,” said another voice, this one belonging to a woman. She approached with arms folded and eyes narrowed. She looked Central Asian and spoke with a vague Slavic accent. She was also incredibly beautiful. “It’s allowed out for meals. New procedure.”

The man dropped Iris’s arm as though disgusted at having touched her. “Damn. We’re just letting them wander the halls now? What is this place coming to?”

The woman shrugged and moved on. She had not, Iris noticed, looked at her even once. Jeremy rolled his eyes, adjusted his tie, and followed after, leaving Iris slightly trembling.

She shuffled slowly up the line without further incident until she reached the first available lunch lady, this one a smiling redhead with dimples. “One-oh-five, right?” she said. “I have your meal here.” It took her an eyeblink to vanish and reappear with another disheartening meal, this one of pork that had almost certainly been grown in a lab with a side of roasted potatoes.

“Thanks,” said Iris. She took her tray and tried to stick close to the walls as she looked for a place to sit. She imagined herself giving off an attention-repelling force field as she edged closer to a table that was, at least, occupied mostly by interns her own age, and relatively close to an exit. She alighted on the bench like a baby bird and tried not to make eye contact. She picked up her fork, eyes fixed on her tray, and heard the distinctive popping of lips that accompanies someone mouthing words that they don’t want another person to hear.

Iris felt her face grow hot. She picked absently at her food for the next twenty minutes, trying to ignore the almost complete halt in conversation amongst the people whose table she’d occupied. She was not, however, given any more trouble, which struck her as strange. Unless everyone had gotten a memo, and that was entirely possible, it was the bystander effect at work: everyone just assumed that someone else had noticed she was there and decided it was alright. 

Iris kept half an eye out for Cain, but he was nowhere to be found. That was fine. Understandable, really. She’d made him uncomfortable by getting in his space and asking stupid questions. Of course he was avoiding her. Probably eating his dinner in his room or something. Iris tapped her fork against the plastic tray morosely. She was on her feet the moment Dr. Lundstrom was back in the room. 

“How was dinner?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Iris.

She finished her puzzle that night. She would keep going out for meals, she decided. If it got too stressful she could always stand up on a table and start screaming and they’d lock her away again. So, that was that. It felt good to have a contingency plan.

With that in mind, she went for breakfast the next morning feeling mellow. Lundstrom made a couple of half-hearted attempts at sweaty-palmed conversation, which Iris responded to curtly. He didn’t make the mistake with his footsteps this time; someone had probably noticed the slip-up on camera. Iris wandered into the canteen and, glancing over the room’s occupants, was disappointed but not surprised to see that her fellow SCP was still absent. Oh, well. It was stupid to even care. She picked at her food, wondering if they’d give her more freedoms if she lost a bunch of weight and convinced them she was wasting away from sadness. It wasn’t an awful plan. Iris decided to eat half her food and leave the rest. 

She did the same at lunch. It wasn’t even difficult; she wasn’t particularly hungry. At dinner, she was halfway to the counter to pick up her food when she noticed the Middle-Eastern man sitting by himself at a table against the wall. Cain had returned. So he wasn’t avoiding her, then! Or he had been, but he’d gotten over it. Still, Iris knew she needed to be more careful not to scare him off. She had one chance at making a friend, or at least an acquaintance. She would rather have died than screw that up.

Iris sat down across from him, and this time he spoke first: “Hello, Iris,” he said. He was eating another slice of meatloaf, or maybe the same meatloaf, going by the color.

“Hello, Cain,” Iris said. Her voiced squeaked a little. She paused. “You, uh...you don’t eat here for every meal?”

“Not every meal,” he confirmed. He was cutting his food into small, identical pieces. Maybe he was a robot, Iris thought. That would explain a lot. A robot that has to eat meatloaf every six hours or it will die.

“That looks terrible,” said Iris, eying Cain’s tray. She had meant to sound sympathetic, but the words came out slightly hostile.

Cain shrugged. “I’m indifferent to it.”

Iris raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Cain sighed. “No, you’re right. It is terrible.”

“Here,” said Iris, spearing a piece of piece of baby corn. She reached out to deposit it onto his tray, but he recoiled immediately like she was going to beat him to death with it.

“No,” said Cain.

“Or not,” said Iris. “Sorry.”

“No apology necessary.” Cain adjusted the hems of his shirtsleeves. “But I can’t eat that.”

“Are you allergic?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Okay.”

“It is, unfortunately, related to why I am here.” Cain looked vaguely surprised, as if he were startled by the words coming out of his mouth.

“That sucks,” said Iris, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Yes,” said Cain. “It does, indeed, ‘suck’.”

The stilted way he said it made Iris want to howl with laughter, but she swallowed it back. “You know why I’m here, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t envy your situation.”

“Thanks.” Irish was compulsively mashing her vegetables again. She poked at her slice of unidentifiable white fish morosely.

“If it’s any consolation, your family has been given state-of-the-art amnestics. Their lives are as comfortable as they were before.”

Irish set her fork down. “That actually doesn’t make me feel better.”

“My apologies.”

“But I understand what you were trying to do.” Iris sighed. “I just- damn. Even after they brought me here, even after I lost my family and my friends and my dog and my clothes, I thought I had a chance to start over, in a way. That didn’t work out, did it?”

Cain had an odd, vacant look in his eyes. “You mean...” His voice had gotten quiet. He moved his eyes deliberately in a way that seemed to mean _I can’t say it aloud, but you know what I mean._

“Yes,” she said. “That was worse than when they first took me, in a way. I was starting to rebuild my life with what I had, and then...I mean, what’s left? What am I supposed to do now?”

“Build again,” said Cain simply. “And when that collapses, start over. And so on until the end of whatever time you have, or else lie down in the dust and wait for the world to bury you.”

Iris looked up, surprised. “Go down fighting, is what you’re saying.”

Cain folded his hands neatly in front of him. “ _Qui tacet consentit_. If someone else is going to be making your choices, force them to work for it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever made anyone’s life harder, ever.” Iris gave a self-effacing smile.

“Even if that were true, it’s never too late to change. That’s not to say you should be reckless. Some things can’t be undone.”

Iris snorted. “Yeah, I know.”

“Ah, I didn’t mean- of course you do.” Cain was slowly tapping his thumbs together.

“If we both know what we know,” said Iris slowly, “then the Foundation knows that we know. Does it really matter if we say it out loud?”

“The concern, as I understand it, is that someone may overhear.”

Iris huffed. “Okay,” she said. “Alright.” She swallowed and glanced around nervously. The mental image of being tackled and injected with some kind of amnestic made her shudder. She hated the thought of having her mind messed with.

“It’s best practice to be discrete,” Cain elaborated. He was being positively chatty this time, Iris thought. He’d also apparently lost interest in his meal in favor of speaking to her, which had to be a good sign where their social progress was concerned.

“I hate best practice,” said Iris.

Another ghostly smile twitched across Cain’s face.

Iris returned to her room that evening with a spring in her step. Her second conversation with Cain had felt like progress, though toward what she wasn’t quite sure. It wasn’t as though she had anything else to work on; bonding with the only other person she was allowed to see multiple times a week was probably worth the effort. A tiny, quickly-snuffed-out part of her mind whispered that, if she ever wanted to get out of here, Cain would probably be incredibly useful.

Iris was musing over her completed boat puzzle when there was a heavy _thwack_ to her left. She turned her head, surprised, half-expecting to see an AK-47 pointed at her face, to see that something had come through the deposit slit in the door to her room.

It was a newspaper.

Specifically, it was a copy of the Arizona Republic. Iris’s mouth felt incredibly dry. She picked it up with shaking hands. The date looked recent. Had Cain…? Of course he had. Or he’d had someone else do it. Iris shook her head in disbelief. 

She remembered, suddenly, something that her roommate had said to her when she was in jail all those years ago: _we have to look out for each other in here_. She’d said it while offering Iris one of the Valium she’d hidden under her tongue, but the point still stood. This was an olive branch; it had to be. 

Iris didn’t even read the paper; not immediately. She slipped it under her mattress instead, for safekeeping, at least until the next room check. She could almost feel it there when she lay down for her restless sleep that night. The princess and the pea, but much less glamorous.

When she went for breakfast that morning, Cain was there once again. More surprisingly, there was another person in the same blue scrubs that Iris was wearing. She was an African-American woman, middle-aged, with the same exhausted demeanor as everyone else in the canteen, and she sat by herself on the opposite side of the room. Iris wanted to go to her immediately, to ask her who she was and what she knew, but she wanted more to keep up her repertoire with Cain.

When she sat down, the first thing she said was, “Who is that woman?” She didn’t need to specify.

Cain leaned forward slightly and rested a hand against his cheek - conveniently covering his mouth from several angles. “She has a Nazi bunker up her nose,” he whispered. He dropped his hand and gave Iris one of his rigid, enigmatic smiles. “Hello, Iris. That is Tanya.”

“Oh,” said Iris, numb. Of course she had a Nazi bunker up her nose. Of _course_ she did.

“If you would prefer to sit with her, I would understand,” said Cain.

Iris hesitated. Was she being brushed off?

“I think she’s rather lonely,” said Cain.

Iris frowned. “Don’t you want to come with me?”

Cain shook his head slightly. “We have some...ideological conflicts.”

“Oh,” said Iris. Why did it feel like half the things Cain said were meant for someone other than her? “Maybe just this one time, then?”

“That’s a good idea,” said Cain. Iris noticed that he had steak and eggs this morning. How lucky that the meatloaf had finally gasped its last.

When Iris sat down with her tray at Tanya’s table, she looked rather startled to see Iris. “Oh, hello,” she said. Her eyes lingered on the symbol on Iris’s clothes. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“New procedure for me,” said Iris. “You’re allowed out for meals, too?”

“Yes,” said Tanya, smiling. The crow’s feet around her eyes crinkled. “I’m quite lucky.” She seemed calm, almost serene. Iris wondered if she’d been here as long as Cain, and at what point you just gave up. Twenty years? Thirty? 

“Doesn’t feel like that, sometimes,” said Iris glumly. Much to her surprise, Tanya chuckled.

“Oh, honey. I used to feel the same way. I was so afraid and angry.” Tanya cupped her face in her hand, and Iris noticed something not quite right behind her eyes: it was like she was half-asleep, somehow. It made Iris’s skin crawl.

“What changed?” Iris managed. She resented Cain for sending her over to this patronizing-

“I realized that God is with me, even here,” said Tanya. “He’s looking out for all of us.”

Iris swallowed. “Okay,” she said. Her voice came out slightly more curt than she’d intended.

“This is part of His plan,” said Tanya. “Some of us have a different place in it than others. But we should be grateful that we get to live here, safe and happy, where we’ll never hurt anyone else.”

“Yep,” said Iris. _Cain! You bastard._

Tanya’s eyes flicked to the side. She smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, honey. I have to go now.”

“That’s too bad,” said Iris. 

“Don’t worry. I’ll be here if you ever need someone to talk to.”

“Thanks,” said Iris. She waited until Tanya was talking animatedly with her handler before picking up her tray and scuttling back to Cain.

“How was your conversation?” said Cain, not looking up from his eggs.

“Fine,” said Iris. She speared one of her slices of whole-grain toast savagely. “She started talking about God and all that, but thankfully she had to go.”

Cain blinked at her. “I take it you’re not religious.”

“I used to be,” said Iris. “I had a cross I wore and everything. They took it from me when they brought me here.” Without thinking, Iris reached up to touch the place below her collarbone where the cross used to lay. “But I wouldn’t wear it now if they gave it back.”

“You no longer believe?” said Cain. He still held a fork in one hand, but his attention was trained entirely on Iris.

Iris laughed bitterly. “Oh, I still believe God exists,” she said. “I just don’t believe he’s looking out for us. Or for anyone.”

Cain gave a short, curt nod that could have meant anything.

“Are you? Religious?”

Cain used his fork to puncture the yolk of one of his eggs. “Not particularly,” he said.

“It’s hard to be, in here.”

“Yes.”

Cain seemed slightly unsettled, and Iris regretted bringing up religion in the first place. 

“I would suspect Tanya appreciated your company regardless,” said Cain.

Iris slumped forward, elbows on the table, propping up her head in one hand. “We can only hope,” she said.

“Is everything alright?”

“I’m not the same as I was,” said Iris. “I used to be a lot better at talking to people. People liked me. Now I just feel like a clumsy idiot.”

“You’re out of practice,” said Cain. “Besides, I like you regardless.” He said it without much feeling, but Iris believed him. He had a trustworthy face.

"Thanks," said Iris. "I like you, too."


	3. Psychiatric Assessment

Over the next few months, Cain became a regular part of Iris’s routine. Though at first he was only in the cafeteria for maybe two out of every five meals, that number quickly increased until the two of them were eating together at least two times a day. She liked the thought that he was showing up to see her. Maybe her presence wasn’t so off-putting after all.

Iris’s relationship with Cain was simple and satisfying. Twenty minutes of conversation, usually casual, but occasionally Iris would talk about her past life or her doubts or her struggles. Cain, she noticed, never spoke about his. But that was alright. He was a good sounding board, perfectly willing to listen to her talk about her feelings. 

The stirring in the back of Iris’s mind grew more intense, especially when she was alone again.

The issue, really, was the name: Cain. Few parents were willing to name their sons Cain, for obvious reasons. And then there was the mark on his forehead. Iris wasn’t going to delude herself: there were really only a couple of explanations for this situation.

One of them was that Cain was a pseudonym that he’d adopted. Because it fit, because he was clever. Because naming yourself after the first murderer is really very edgy. The other was that he was really…

...well, Iris struggled with that one. But nothing was impossible; she knew that now. But he seemed so human, in his odd, mechanical way. He wasn’t, by any means, evil. He was no Bible-study caricature. Or was he? Was she smart enough, experienced enough, to tell?

...And what did that mean for what had happened to her all those years ago? Could he really be related to-

A dull buzz, and the door to Iris’s room opened, stirring her from her thoughts. Reynolds, a minor member of the site’s medical team, was here to take her to her psych appointment. Iris sighed heavily. She had more important things to think about, in her humble opinion. She sat up where she was sprawled out on her bed, got to her feet, gave herself a mental once-over, and stepped forward.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

“Follow me, one-oh-five,” said Reynolds. He looked bored. The man was tall and gangly, but stood with a slight stoop. His hair, which was always shellacked with an excess of strong-smelling gel, added at least an extra inch to his height. There was a mole beneath his right eye - Iris had onced asked him if it was an SCP. He hadn’t found it funny. Iris followed after him. Reynolds was an old-timer. He would never be as easy to finagle as Lindstrom.

He was also utterly silent as they processed down the hall to the sterile white-and-grey room where Iris was invited to sit while she waited for the psychiatrist. The armed guard posted outside the door jerked his chin at her as she entered. The pompous gesture made her nervous. It reminded her of-

Nope. Not going there.

Iris was lucky: safe enough that she got to see her psychiatrist in person, if through a pane of bulletproof glass. She sat down at the table pushed up against the grimy plexiglass window. The room was cold.

“Hello, one-oh-five,” said Dr. Tremblay. “How are we today?”

“Fine,” said Iris, choosing a cinderblock in the wall to stare at instead of the impassive face of the middle-aged woman in front of her. Tremblay was a thin, sharp-faced woman whose icy manner made her a perfect choice for a combination psychiatrist-interrogator.

“Let’s start with the usual.” Dr. Tremblay pulled a pencil out from behind an ear. “In the past week, please rate how often you’ve had the following experiences on a scale of one to five, with one being ‘not at all’, and five being ‘every day’.” The spiel was as automatic and dispassionate as ever. “Low or depressed mood.”

“One,” said Iris. Tremblay made a mark on the sheet in front of her.

“Thoughts of suicide.”

“One,” said Iris.

“Diminished appetite.”

“Three,” said Iris.

“Sleeplessness or excessive sleeping.”

“Three.”

“Irritability.”

“Two.”

“Anxiety or panic.”

“One.”

“Thank you.” Tremblay flipped the sheet of paper over and set it to the side. She adjusted her bifocals and opened a manila folder; she produced a sheet of paper and studied it for a moment. Iris wished that, just once, she’d ask a question that actually mattered. _Rate the following questions on a scale from one to five: do you still feel like a little girl in an adult woman’s body? Do you wish you’d killed yourself when you had the chance? Do you secretly fear that you’ll be like him one day?_

“Now, your nightmares. When last we spoke, they were still bothering you.”

Iris gritted her teeth. “Yeah,” she said. She was already on edge today. This was going to suck.

“And now? Are they distressing you as much as they were last week?”

Iris felt her fists clench. _Man covered in blood, eyes crazed, digging his fingers into Iris’s stomach, digging and digging until blood sprayed out of her mouth. Black-line tattoos, squiggling and warping into lines of unreadable text._ She’d woken having wet the bed more than once, in the beginning.

“Sort of,” Iris lied.

“Still always on the same topic?” They’d learned by now how Iris responded when they said his name or his number. She knew what they meant, anyway.

“Yes,” said Iris, crossing her legs at the ankle. Her heart was beating fast. She was getting mad. Being reminded of him made her mad. It made her want to throw things. It had taken a long time for the fear to fade enough to reveal just how much _anger_ there was underneath, more and more each day.

“Have you made any progress in dealing with your feelings regarding this individual?”

It was so funny. He’d made her more like him when he’d done it. Iris wanted to headbutt the glass until it shattered and leap through into the room where her interviewer was hiding. She wanted to gut her. She wanted to show off her skills, her training, and make them all afraid for what they’d allowed to happen.

Maybe if she’d been good enough, he wouldn’t have done it? In Iris’s fantasies, she is impenetrable, bulletproof, as she advances on him, groaning _Why, why why?_ As he slowly backs himself into a corner, shaking his head. _You could have admitted we were good enough but you were too fucking stupid_ , Iris says. And then she kills him, of course.

“I don’t have any feelings toward Able,” said Iris, even though his name made her mouth taste like bile. But it felt good to say it, like she was spitting in his face. She hated how he managed to control her even now, gone and locked up wherever it was they kept him. 

Dr. Tremblay looked up, clearly surprised...and interested. “He was a part of the project you worked on. You went to his training sessions. You must have had some feelings.” Tremblay folded her hands in front of her and leaned forward intently. This was why they couldn’t have guards in the room: couldn’t have them hearing the deep cuts.

Iris thought about shoving her fingers down her throat and vomiting on the floor in retaliation. She thought about screaming and spitting and being carried safely away in restraints. She thought about the cool rush of the sedative in her veins.

“He was an ass,” Iris spat. “He yelled at me for losing my grip on my weapon and said I’d always be an insect if I didn’t fight. Always so arrogant.”

“You must have impressed him, then.”

Iris laughed grimly. She kicked at the floor. “No one impressed him.”

“He didn’t bother correcting most people outside of his unit.”

Iris shut her eyes and huffed out a breath. She was lying, she was pretty sure. They wanted to get more out of her, since she was talking. She tried to avoid talking about him, thinking about him. She’d said too much already, gotten Tremblay’s hopes up.

“Actually, he requested that you be the one to replace his ‘second’, if the need arose.” Tremblay’s voice was quiet.

Iris’s heart nearly stopped. No fucking way. “No, he didn’t. I’m not stupid,” she said. _Whoreson_ , he’d spat at her, veins standing out in his forehead. She was pretty sure he hadn’t even realized she was a girl. _You falter, you will be stabbed to death!_ He’d dragged “stabbed” out into two syllables, the English still stiff on his tongue, and illustrated his rebuke with a “stabbing” gesture that had made Iris pee a little bit. She’d been fifteen then, and if there was one thing to be said for Able, it was that he hadn’t drawn any distinction between her and the rest of the people he was training: they were all just bodies to him.

“I’m detecting some hostility, one-oh-five,” said Tremblay icily. 

“Of course I’m hostile!” Iris snapped. “Leave me alone!” Her heart rate was going up. The place in her arm where they’d placed her microchip throbbed a little. She slammed the toes of one foot into the concrete floor hard enough to hurt.

“If you’re going to be acting out, we may have to reconsider certain privileges for your safety and that of the staff.”

Iris froze. _Bastards, bastards, bastards._ Iris was jealous of Able, sometimes. Being able to pry open a blast-proof door with her fingers and decapitate some people sounded pretty good right about now. It wasn’t just the threat; it was _the way they did it_. The way they made it sound like it was her fault, the “for your own safety” bullshit. Iris unclenched her jaw. It wasn’t enough for them to take your freedom away; they had to make you feel like you deserved it.

“I’m not going to act out.” She forced her voice to be as calm and even as possible.

“Good. We have one other topic to discuss today.”

“Hooray.” Iris gave a helpless little chuckle.

“What is the nature of your relationship with SCP-073?”

Hmm, okay. Had to go carefully, here. What did they want her to say? What were they afraid of? Did they want her to get close to him, or were they worried she had already? Were they going to take him away from her? He wasn’t the most uplifting companion, but his small, rigid smiles and occasional bits of insight were the closest thing to a human connection that Iris had had in years.

“No relationship,” said Iris. “We eat together sometimes.”

Tremblay raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

“What do you talk about?”

“I don’t know. Humanoid stuff. Um, just boring small talk, mostly. Sometimes I tell him about my life.”

“He asks you about yourself?”

“Uh. No.” Iris felt herself flush slightly. But he tolerated her unprompted rambles like a champ.

“He expresses interest in your past life.”

“Well, not really.” Iris was beginning to feel stupid. She avoided looking into Tremblay’s cool grey eyes. “I guess he mostly just listens. But he’s a good sport about it.”

“I see.” The sound of notes being taken. Tremblay’s pen whipped across the page. “I think that’s all for today. You’ve been very forthcoming. Thank you, Iris.”

 

“What is the nature of your relationship with SCP-105?” The voice that came through the speaker in the small interview room was tinny and shrill.

Cain folded his hands neatly in his lap. “Our relationship is casual and amicable. We have eaten many of our meals together and enjoyed casual conversation.”

“Enjoyed? What does that mean?”

Cain repressed an exasperated sigh. “I believe that we both appreciate conversing with one another.”

There was a brief pause. The speaker fizzed.

“Are you attracted to SCP-105?”

Cain blinked. “No,” he said. It was true; if anything, he saw her much like a niece or an apprentice: a younger person that he could mentor or protect.

“Would you have sex with SCP-105 if it asked you to?”

“No,” said Cain, slightly louder. The choice of pronoun, as always, grated a bit.

“Do you believe SCP-105 may be attracted to you?”

“No,” Cain repeated. “There is no romantic interest between the two of us.”

There was another crackling pause. Cain longed to return to his work. “If romantic interest were to develop, would you inform Foundation personnel immediately?”

“Yes,” Cain said.

“Dismissed,” said the voice over the speaker.

“I have some information to share before I leave,” said Cain. He laced his fingers in his lap.

“Proceed,” said the voice.

“I believe that Iris is becoming attached to me because of our shared status as anomalous assets. However, I also believe that our interactions have been beneficial to her mental health.”

“Why would you believe that?”

“Her rate of speech has increased, and her emotional affect has become more dynamic since we introduced ourselves. Both of these point to improved mood and social functioning.”

“I see. Is your recommendation that these interactions continue?”

“Yes. I would recommend that.”

“Thank you for your cooperation. Dismissed.” The door to the chamber buzzed.

“One more moment. I haven’t finished.”

“You’re beginning to try my patience today, Cain.”

Cain almost smiled. “My apologies. But it occurs to me that I would perform my duties more efficiently if I had someone to assist me.”

“You’re asking for a partner?”

“I’m simply drawing attention to a possible oversight in the allocation of Foundation resources.”

“I see.”

“Thank you. Also, I would like to request more unscented deodorant.”

“Noted.”

 

The members of SCP-073’s psychiatric team watched him leave the interview room on the computer monitor they sat clustered around.

“What’s gotten into Cain lately?” asked Dr. Andersen. “He seems almost chipper. You know, for him.”

“He’s in love,” said Andersen’s partner, a plump blonde woman by the name of Jones. A smile tugged at her mouth.

“Very funny.” Andersen took a bite of his egg salad sandwich. It dropped a glob of mayo onto his shirt. From her chair in the corner of the observation room, Dr. Tremblay wrinkled her nose in distaste.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Well, kind of. I think it is Iris. I think he’s really developing some kind of a bond with her. Or as close to a bond as the ma- as it is capable of forming.” The slip in professionalism did not go unnoticed; Tremblay frowned severely. It was unseemly for a member of staff to talk about the assets like they were people.

“It is interesting,” said Andersen with his mouth full. “That’s new. And potentially very useful. I wonder if we could leverage that to get more out of him. I have a feeling there’s loads rattling around in that peculiar brain of his that would be astounding if we could just get it out of him.” Tremblay recrossed her legs and continued to frown.

“Let’s just ask Iris to interview him about you-know-who. I’m sure that will go over well with both of them.”

“You-know-who? Is he fucking Voldemort? You think he’s going to appear in the room if we say his name?” Andersen was continuing to lose half of the contents of his sandwich onto his shirt.

“Do you know for certain that he won’t? Anyway, Voldemort doesn’t- nevermind.”

Tremblay cleared her throat and folded her arms neatly. “That request it made…”

“A definite maybe. Let them spend more time together. Maybe risk fewer cellulose disintegration incidents since she’s not a walking biohazard?”

“Hmm.” Tremblay tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I’ll put in the request. We’re so understaffed these days that we might just get this through if we present a cogent action plan.”

Andersen beamed. “Oh, thank you. You know how I am with paperwork. My notes for these sessions are just a pile in a drawer at the moment.”

Tremblay frowned. “What?”

“Oh, you know. We all get lazy.” He laughed nervously.

“No. No, we do not. That is absolutely unacceptable and I have no choice but to file a disciplinary report.”

“What? Oh, come on!”

“What if someone were to simply take them out of your desk? Did that really not occur to you? Your notes go into the proper storage! Good grief. This is why we need more paper pushers around here.” She slumped in her chair like an exhausted mother of four.

Jones looked sympathetic. They were all tired. Adderall and the spirit of scientific inquiry could only get them so far.

“One-oh-five spoke quite freely today regarding seventy-six,” said Tremblay. “I think that, given a bit more time, a more _rigorous_ interview would finally generate results. I believe we may be able to add some information to seventy-six’s psych profile with its assistance. We can play these two off each other. I don’t think anyone else has had as many meaningful interactions with seventy-six and lived.”

“But Cain’s been around the block a few times,” Jones said. “He knows all our tricks.” She was spinning slowly in her office chair. 

“But it does so enjoy being useful,” said Tremblay thoughtfully. “It seems to gain genuine pleasure from prosocial behavior. We may not even have to manipulate it to get it to talk to us.”

Jones nodded. “And we know Iris forms pretty intense bonds when she’s given the chance. If she’s devoted to him, she’ll do whatever she thinks will protect him.”

Andersen, who’d finished his sandwich, nodded vigorously. “We’re so good at this,” he said enthusiastically. “We’re going to get an award.”

Tremblay rolled her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It used to be standard to have Safe SCPs who were just allowed to wander around the facility. I decided to keep that bit of old canon for this story, but I think they'd still be pretty watchful about how the skips were interacting. Also, my personal headcanon is that Cain makes people feel relaxed and safe around him. This may or may not be an anomalous trait, but it's subtle enough that it's helped him get the Foundation to work with him.
> 
> Next chapter: Iris gets a job and learns more about Cain. She finds something she probably shouldn't have (dun dun DUN).


	4. Paperwork

When Dr. Lindstrom came to escort Iris to breakfast, he was smiling broadly and holding a manila envelope. Iris’s first thought was, _oh no._

“Some good news today, Iris!” he said. His camp-counselor enthusiasm was off the charts. “We’ve just got to have a little meeting before breakfast. Alright?”

“What’s the news?” asked Iris.

“You’ll see.” He took off.

Iris felt obligated to follow, or things would get awkward. “Did I do something? Is this about...my psych evals?”

“Oh, no,” said Lindstrom. “No, it’s- well, I said you’ll see.”

They had only walked to the end of the hall, but Lindstrom used his badge to open the simple, unmarked door. He gestured for her to go first.

Iris was...stunned, to say the least. She found herself in a perfectly ordinary office meeting room, stubby grey carpet and all. There was a dusty fake plant on the simple wooden table, and around that table sat two unfamiliar staff members, Dr. Tremblay, and Cain. What was this? An intervention? A surprise party? Lindstrom dropped his envelope on the table with a smack. It fell open, and Iris took the opportunity to sit down across from Cain (who gave her one of his rigid smiles) while he awkwardly collected the scattered paperwork from the floor.

The atmosphere in the room was very similar to that of a parent-teacher meeting. Iris stared at the door opposite the one she’d entered through and wondered where it led. She still, after all this time, couldn’t form a mental picture of how the building was laid out. Of course, she knew that was no coincidence.

“Now, then,” said Dr. Tremblay smoothly. “Since, one-oh-five, we’ve observed very stable behavior in you since we’ve loosened your containment restrictions, we have decided to give you another opportunity.” She adjusted her spectacles. “You will be assisting seventy-three in clerical duties three times per week in three-hour increments, provided your good behavior continues.”

Iris looked at Cain. He raised his eyebrows minutely.

Iris frowned. “I have to file paperwork?”

“You get to file paperwork,” Tremblay clarified sternly. “This is a very good opportunity to learn some vital skills. Of course, it also means that you and seventy-three will be able to form a solid working relationship. We very much value the social wellbeing of the humanoids on this ward.”

One of the unfamiliar doctors, a blonde woman, piped up. “Work opportunities are a valuable way to keep our charges healthy and stimulated. We really want only the best for you.” She gave a dimpled smile.

Cain kicked Iris’s ankle under the table. There was a definite upside to this: more time spent with the closest thing she’d ever have to a friend. More time out of her godawful cell. Maybe the chance to get to know some other staff, get them to trust her...

“Okay,” said Iris.

“Great!” said Lindstrom.

“Marvelous,” said Tremblay. The two unidentified staff scribbled in their notebooks. She could see that one of them, a man, appeared to simply be scribbling squiggly lines. Tremblay slid an access badge across the table to Iris.

“This will grant you very limited access to some of the rooms on this level. Publicly accessible bathrooms, conference rooms, and some areas more specific to your duties - seventy-three here will explain these to you. You will be accompanied by seventy-three or an escort at all times as you travel between rooms. If you are seen attempting to access an area which you have not been granted permission to enter, all privileges you have been given to wander the site will be revoked immediately. The same stands for attempting to evade security cameras or access documentation which you have not been cleared for. You may be allowed to view some classified information that is of trivial security. This is because you are already familiar with a good portion of the Foundation’s contents and its history. Do not believe for one moment that we freely trust you.”

“Okay,” said Iris, again. Iris picked up the piece of flat plastic. The access badge had her number on it, her name in quotation marks, and, presumably, a picture of her face. This one had been taken months ago, when they were updating her file. At the moment, it looked like an admittedly fuzzy image of a blank white wall with a fluorescent light overhead. Still got it, she thought. Iris let go of the badge. Oh, there she was. Iris Thompson, staring blankly ahead, eyes hollow. Her hair hadn’t been brushed that day. She looked exhausted and washed out and unsmiling.

Tremblay watched her interact with her badge with lips pursed. “Recall, of course, that your interaction with photographic images is also to be limited.”

“Right,” said Iris. “But I wouldn’t be able to do much with them, anyway. I didn’t take them, and I haven’t practiced my abilities in years.”

“That’s reassuring to hear.”

Iris felt her stomach flip. Really, she shouldn’t have mentioned her abilities at all. But it was still a sore spot: being without her camera was like being without one of her arms. She wondered if she would lose her skills completely, one day, if they’d atrophy away like an unused muscle.

The thought terrified her.

“If everything is clear,” said the blonde woman, “then I believe we’ll let the two of you get to your breakfast. Have a nice day.”

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Iris watched Cain poke at his eggs with just a tinge of suspicion.

“Should I assume you got this job for me?”

“Yes,” said Cain. “I thought you might like to be out and about more often.”

“Well, um.” Iris felt a little guilty about her initial reaction. “Thank you, Cain. I appreciate you thinking of me.”

He tipped his head forward in assent. His hair fell over the mark on his forehead and partially covered his eyes, but there it was: a smile. Not a rigid, mechanical one, but a real smile, if a faltering one. _Well, I’ll be damned_.

“So we’re going to be research partners.” Iris had to admit the idea sounded kind of cool. “Maybe I’ll get a coat one day. More flattering than the scrubs. Or one of those tasers all the nurses carry.”

“I did not get a taser,” said Cain.

“Right. I guess that could be a liability if you went crazy and tried to kill everyone in the facility or something?” Iris’s voice pitched up abruptly as that train of thought made her realize something. She hadn’t noticed before, she had had no reason to compare the two, but Cain, if you looked at the shape of his nose and chin, bore more than a slight resemblance to... _him_.

Well, it made sense.

“That would be dangerous,” said Cain.

Iris was going to have to ask eventually.

“What sort of jobs will I start with?” Iris asked instead.

Cain nodded. “There is a need to reorganize and - ah - reserve low-security auxiliary documentation. Minor medical documentation, test results and the like. Currently the hard copies are stored in a rather chaotic fashion. Some are also very old and have not been digitized.”

“What do you mean by reserve?”

Cain finished chewing a bite of egg. “Ah, well. I have a certain gift of memory that is rather useful. Many files are, in essence, stored in backup within my mind.”

“A photographic memory?” asked Iris. The irony wasn’t lost on her.

“Yes,” said Cain.

“And they trust you with all that,” Iris marvelled.

Cain shrugged. “I have been here a long time.”

“How long?”

Cain hesitated.

Iris dipped her head and pretended to play with her food, allowing her hair to cover her mouth. “More than fifty years?”

If Cain was surprised to hear that she’d guessed at his probable immortality, he didn’t show it.

“Close,” he said.

“Wow,” said Iris. She fiddled with her whole-wheat English muffin some more. So far her list of confirmed traits was “doesn’t age” and “only seems to eat animal products”. She’d checked, and there wasn’t even pepper on his food.

“When do I work? No one said,” said Iris.

Cain nodded. “Yes. They left it up to me to explain. You are to work after lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. After eating, I will take you with me and provide instruction. I’ve been given...quite a lot of freedom in that regard.”

“They really trust you,” Iris marvelled.

Cain dipped his head again. “Perhaps so.” He seemed to be thinking, then. “Do you know what day it is, Iris?”

“No,” Iris admitted. It had never mattered before. She usually knew when it was the weekend because fewer people passed her room, but the rest of the days ran together. But she’d need to know now, wouldn’t she?

“It’s Wednesday,” said Cain solemnly. “So after lunch, I will take you to assist me in organizing a storage space. It’s been long neglected.”

Iris grinned. She liked Cain, she realized. She really did. And that was part of why thinking about his origins was so difficult. But maybe it didn’t really matter. If he was kind to her, if he was a good man, then he deserved to be able to leave his past behind, just like anyone else.

“Can’t wait,” said Iris. And she meant it.

As was usual for her now, Iris spent the time between meals perched on the side of her bed, thinking. She wondered how her life would change, now. She had some half-baked fantasies about raising a coup, escaping with Cain to start life anew. But that would never happen. She didn’t earnestly believe that he wanted to escape, anyway. It was obvious that he was comfortable here.

Lunch that day was a pleasant affair. Cain neglected his dry pork chops in favor of speaking to Iris about her new appointment. He seemed almost excited, and it occurred to Iris that fifty years (or more than fifty) of working alone would have to be boring beyond belief.

When they’d both eaten, Cain offered a small smile and clasped his hands. “Well, then,” he said. “Shall we get to it?”

Iris smiled back at him. “I’m ready.”

\-----------------------------------------

Cain herded Iris carefully through the halls, pausing now and again to open doors with his keycard. “We’re going to be clearing out filing cabinets for the next week or two,” he said. “Nothing contained there is especially important, so it’s been allowed to fall into disorder for far too long.”

Iris wondered, for the first time, what Cain’s cell looked like. She imagined him organizing his sock drawer and stifled a laugh.

The pulled up abruptly on a door which was simply labeled “STORAGE” and Cain scanned it open. It was dark, and he flicked the lights on for them. What they were looking at was rows and rows of filing cabinets, a table, and a handful of folding chairs. The fluorescent light cast a good portion of the room in shadow.

“ _Whoo!_ ” yipped Iris in mock excitement, and Cain’s nose crinkled with amusement.

“If it’s a bit too much excitement, let me know,” said Cain. Iris would realize later that this was the first time she’d heard him tell a real joke. “I’ve marked the cabinets I already went through with a green sticker - you see?”

A handful of adjacent cabinets had a green circle stuck to the front, perfectly centered. Cain as probable sock-drawer-organizer was seeming more likely by the moment.

“And the yellow stickers?” Iris asked. “Are those in-progress?”

Cain nodded. “Yes. Very good. This will work well, I think.” He was tugging at the wrist of one of his gloves. That was another thing Iris made a mental note to ask about, one day: why was he literally always wearing gloves?

Cain approached one of the cabinets and tapped it gently. “This one I think I’ll leave up to you,” he said. “There are some labelled folders, and anything that looks relevant can stay there. But unlabelled papers need to be sorted. If it looks out of place, simply set it aside for now, and we can create new folders to group similar items.” The prospect of organizing had him looking relaxed. “I’ve left the cabinets unlocked for now, since there are restrictions on who can enter the room.”

“Cool,” said Iris, bouncing on her toes. She was happier than she’d expected about this job. It was more enrichment, wasn’t it? Some goal-oriented activity for her to work at. If they gave her another survey, she decided that she’d rate this one quite highly.

“I’ll work on this one.” Cain jerked his thumb at another cabinet. “And if you’ve any questions, just ask. I am happy to help you.” He smiled at her again.

Iris sauntered up to her cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. Cain scuffled off to her side, working on his designated section of the room. He hadn’t been lying about the disorder; it was like someone had just decided to shove decades of boring notices in here, with only a couple attempts and organizing things into folders. One such folder was labelled “FINANCE” and contained charts and graphs that seemed to relate to expenditure; Iris left these where they were. Another folder had been labelled “DATA” and contained nothing but a receipt for the purchase of a single head of lettuce. Iris set it aside. There was so much stuff crammed in here that papers had gotten stuck behind the drawers, falling into the body of the filing cabinet. Iris went fishing back there and pulled out...what was this, anyway? They were old and yellowed.

“I think these are instructions for fire extinguishers that no longer exist,” said Iris, looking toward Cain. “Look, must be from the eighties.” She flapped the pamphlets at him.

Cain glanced up briefly. “Older,” he said. He was examining a stack of carbon paper. “Let’s make a pile for garbage.” He gestured to the table.

Iris wandered over and set the pamphlets and the receipt down together. Progress! She was still useful, after all this time. She fetched the empty “DATA” folder and added it to the pile. As it turned out, most of what was in her cabinet was trash; forty-five minutes later, the table was almost covered with useless scraps of paper.

“What are we going to do with all this?” Iris wondered aloud. She realized they didn’t have a trash can.

“Destroy it,” said Cain. He glanced up from where he was sorting a stack of notecards. “Oh,” he said. “That’s a lot.”

“Do we have to shred the papers? Or incinerate them?”

Cain walked over to the table. “No,” he said. There was a plastic tub sitting on one of the chairs; Cain picked it up now and began filling it with Iris’s garbage. When that was done, he placed the tub back on the table and matter-of-factly removed his gloves. Iris inhaled.

Was there something covering…? No, those were his hands. Made of a copper-colored metal, they were shifting, overlapping plates that moved together as smoothly as a real human hand. It was incredibly beautiful, some kind of exotic craftsmanship. Iris wondered how much of him looked like that. She’d never seen any part of his bare skin except his face and neck.

Cain reached into the box and simply...mashed his hands around in the papers. But something even stranger happened, which was that they immediately began to decay. They fell apart as if aging hundreds of years in a damp attic, turning into blackish dust wherever Cain’s hands touched.

 _He has robot hands that turn things to compost_ , Iris thought in disbelief. It wasn’t the weirdest thing she could have imagined, but it was up there. At least it was useful for destroying documents.

“Is that why the gloves? Everything you touch turns to, um, dirt? Sorry, I’m just curious.”

Cain hummed a little, continuing to sift through the remaining scraps of undamaged paper. “Only those things which are made of plant material,” he said. “But it is convenient for this purpose. I would imagine it’s as effective as burning. Although, perhaps fire would be better for destroying potential pathogens.”

“Oh,” said Iris. She thought that if anyone had decided to store their pathogens in a random filing cabinet, they were probably screwed anyway. “Can I ask about your hands?”

Cain flicked bits of decayed paper off of said hands. He’d left the tub filled with a fine black dust. “My hands? Oh...yes. What about them?”

“Is all of you made of metal? Or just…”

“My arms and legs.” Cain seemed to think, pulling his gloves back on. “And there’s some in my spine.”

 _So he wasn’t a robot, then. He was a cyborg_.

“Is that what makes stuff decay?”

Cain shook his head curtly. “That’s simply my person, I’m afraid. Now, if we might continue…”

They returned to their respective filing cabinets, working in silence. Iris couldn’t place why, but she felt awkward having asked about his hands. Was it weird to ask someone about their body parts? After all, you wouldn’t ask someone about an embarrassing skin condition, she reasoned. But if that skin condition was more like a superpower...Was he embarrassed about having robot arms? Iris thought she might be a little shy about it. She wondered whether Cain had any feeling in the metal parts of his body. Were they advanced prosthetics?

“I’ve found something,” Cain said.

Iris looked up, excited. “What?” she asked. Cain was holding a stack of what looked like cardstock.

“I’m uncertain,” said Cain. “They’re pictures. They look like watercolors, but I can hardly imagine someone thought to store their art projects here. These must be the result of some sort of testing, or perhaps an anomalous individual made them.”

“Nice,” said Iris. “What do we do?”

“Store them,” said Cain neatly. “We’ve a place for these here on-site. I’ve heard it called the Toy Box. It’s for items which, although not apparently anomalous themselves, are the product of an anomalous item. It requires Level 2 security clearance, but you have access to it. As we aren’t certain as to where these originated, it would be a good idea to store them there.”

“Are we both going there, then?” asked Iris. The thought of getting to explore another high-security closet was actually a little exciting.

“It’s on this floor,” said Cain. “Which means that we can both go, yes. It would be a good idea to familiarize you with the area.” He shuffled the paintings in his hands. “I think I’ll have you carry these. It would be very unfortunate if I accidentally damaged them.”

Iris quickly took them out of his (cyborg!) hands. They were abstract swirls of color. Pretty, but a bit childlike. There were at least twenty pressed into the stack.

“Right this way, then,” said Cain.

He led her once more through the facility - they seemed to be going pretty far from her cell this time. It made Iris oddly nervous. Cain smiled or nodded at most of the staff they passed, but Iris noticed that only some of them acknowledged him in return. Many simply pretended they hadn’t seen him, or looked away uncomfortably. It hurt Iris in a way her own treatment never had. Cain was smart and kind; if anyone deserve to be treated like a person, it was him.

Iris was still brooding on this when Cain opened another identical white door and very nearly walked into a short, rotund man with dark skin and, peculiarly, a lion’s mane.

“Cain!” said the man cheerfully. His voice was low, raspy, and warm. “Gave me a fright for a second, there.” He stepped back and tilted his head back to regard Cain’s face.

“Hello, Bes,” said Cain. “I apologize. I didn’t see you.”

Bes chuckled. “Most people don’t, what with my height and all. Ah, the curse of the short!” He wedged his hands against his hips.

“Bes?” said Iris. It was coming back to her, the man starting to look familiar. They’d met, hadn’t they? Maybe years ago, after the incident, when Iris was doped up on sedatives all the time.

“Iris? Little Iris?” said Bes. “How the hell are ya, girl?” Iris remembered now! He’d treated her after one of her embarrassing episodes, when she’d...accidentally hurt herself.

“I’m good!” said Iris. It was true; she felt much better to see a familiar face.

“I can’t believe how you’ve grown!” said Bes. “You were...what, sixteen? Haven’t seen you around since then.”

“I haven’t seen much of _you_ , Bes, come to think of it,” said Cain.

Bes shrugged. “What can I say? These folks know how to keep a guy busy. I’m treating the D-class now. Always bones to set and livers to put back into body cavities. No rest for the wicked!”

“No indeed,” said Cain.

“I’m glad you’re still around,” said Iris. “I remember you were so kind to me after I...had my accident.”

Bes nodded warmly. “You’re looking better, Iris. Not that you weren’t great before! But you’ve got some color in your cheeks again.”

Iris giggled, feeling fond. “Thank you,” she said. “You look well, too.”

Bes puffed out his chest. “Of course! I’ve been watching my figure.” He slapped his round belly pointedly and chuckled.

“Well, we’re off to deal with some business,” said Cain, bowing his head respectfully. He stepped to the side to allow Bes to pass through the door first. He did so, patting Iris’s shoulder as he went.

“Take care, both of you,” he said, and wandered down the hall, whistling a cheerful tune.

“I like that guy,” said Iris. Cain nodded.

“We are almost there,” he said. “You’ve done well.”

Iris nodded, but she cringed inside. How low had she stooped that simply walking through a building was an act worthy of praise? Did she still look like a child to him, nervous and inept, the way she so often felt to herself?

Iris was deep in brooding thought when they reached the Toy Box. The hallways they’d traversed to get here all seemed so identical that Iris realized she truly had no idea where they were. Cain scanned them in. This room was slightly fancier than the previous one; it was lined with secure lockers and the lights were bright enough to thoroughly illuminate the room’s corners. And there were two tables, here.

The lockers, which were the most significant features, were made of shiny steel and completely unlabeled except for a single number. Each one seemed to be made up of a number of drawers, each no doubt holding its own unique secrets.

“Recall, of course, that this room has 24/7 CCTV coverage,” said Cain quietly. His tone was non-judgemental, but said _In case you were thinking of breaking the rules_. Iris nodded.

“There is a system of classification,” Cain continued, clasping his hands behind his back. “I believe images are stored in locker seven.” He said _I believe_ , but Iris was pretty sure that he knew.

“Okay,” said Iris, shuffling the papers in her hands. “So where…?”

“The lockers are clearly labeled,” said Cain, gesturing. “I’m going to visit the restroom, but I’ll be back promptly. I trust you to find it for yourself. I’m uncertain which drawers are in use and which are empty. Each locker has a number of drawers with slots into which pieces of paper can be inserted. And, of course, remember the cameras. The access code is six-three-two-zero.”

Iris nodded, frowning. Was this a test? Surely it was; Cain wanted to see if she’d misbehave while he was off taking a piss. Well, she wouldn’t. She’d worked too hard to get this far. Cain dipped his head and left the room. Alright, locker seven. Locker seven, locker seven…

It was easy to find. It was tucked into the corner. “7” had been taped to the front in laminated paper. Iris started with the top drawer. This one contained a single yellow button, which Iris regarded with suspicion before closing the drawer again. She opened the drawer immediately below it.

What was…?

Oh! That was photographic paper! Iris’s pulse raced. Very naughty. Definitely off-limits. But she had to peek a little. There was even a label at the front: SCP-978 EXTENDED. Well, that was unhelpful. Iris pulled out the tray, just a bit.

Oh, there were pictures, alright. Polaroids, specifically. They seemed to have nothing initially in common. One was of a red-faced man playing fetch with a Doberman. Another showed two people kissing. Several had been covered with a sheet of cardstock, each piece printed with small black text. Iris pulled the drawer out a little further.

“I just got the wrong drawer,” Iris imagined herself saying. “It was an accident. I didn’t touch anything.”

The pictures in the back were more interesting. There was a picture of a masked man in a long, black robe embracing a little girl. Where these things real? Were they art? And-

Oh, thought Iris. Oh. There was Cain! In another picture, he was crouched in the middle of what looked like a field of zucchini, happily examining some of his plants. And in the background, a handful of people who looked a lot like him. Some of them might even have been-

Iris exhaled. Best not to look too long. Best not to break the rules. But there was another photo, behind the first, stuffed into the locker like it was garbage. Iris pulled it out. She sighed softly, surprised at her own mild response. It was _him_. Able. Abel. There he was, feeding his goats, with a burning city behind him (of course). But she was holding the photograph, and it hadn’t changed at all. Or at least that was what she thought, until the figure in the photo shuddered and twitched like a reanimated corpse. Iris gasped and, unthinking, shoved the photo into her pocket. She pushed the drawer shut, heart hammering.

 _I’m dead,_ she thought. _They’ll know I took it. I’m dead._ She felt oddly calm about it. It was a relief, really. She’d finally get the confrontation she’d always wanted. Iris shut the drawer. She opened the next one. It was empty. Perfect for these pictures, she reasoned. She deposited them with care, and closed the locker, and then Cain was back. He hadn’t peed, obviously, unless he was really fast about it. He’d probably gone to tell some official about Iris’s performance. That was fine. This was all fine.

“All done,” said Iris breezily. Cain nodded at her.

“Good,” he said. “You found a spare place for those items?”

"Yes,” said Iris calmly. “A lot of the drawers were empty.”

“Good,” Cain repeated awkwardly. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Well, then. Let’s continue.”

They continued. They reorganized some drawers in the Toy Box, and then they returned to their initial room to collect the garbage Cain had created. It was, all in all, a mellow day.

 _I’m going to die_ , thought Iris, periodically. Or was she? Did they really have the staff to monitor the CCTV 24/7? Maybe they only checked it if they suspected misdemeanor. Maybe she’d get away with it. Iris hadn’t _gotten away with_ anything in so long. She went back to her cell that evening still thinking about it, the photo burning hot in her pocket. She collapsed into bed and slept, briefly. When she awoke, she walked slowly to the bathroom. The cameras didn’t record the area around the toilet; they’d allowed her that small dignity. Iris sat on it, and pulled out the contraband she’d collected. There he was. He wasn’t so scary in the picture. He wore a loose linen tunic, and he wasn’t tattooed, here. He’d moved before, Iris thought. Hadn’t he?

And then, as if prompted, he did it again. The figure juddered and twitched, head snapping up to stare directly into Iris’s eyes.

 _Iris_ , said a voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere, cutting directly into Iris’s mind. _There you are._

Iris stared into Able's cold, dead eyes, and she swallowed a scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cain: the world's most expensive paper shredder! 
> 
> Next chapter: a totally not cursed photo that totally won't do anything bad, and Iris learns even more about her buddy.


	5. The Ship of Theseus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter contains a brief reference to suicidal behavior. Also be aware that things are getting a bit darker. As I'm writing them, Iris and Able had a pretty unhealthy relationship (nothing romantic, though, don't worry).

Iris spent the night in a cold sweat, waiting for the guards to break down her door and shout at her for stealing - _stealing!_ \- from the Toy Box. One day. She hadn’t even managed to go one day without doing something stupid. That showed how ready she was to be reintroduced to normal society. But no one came. It was possible they were waiting. It was likewise possible that no one had yet reviewed the footage from that room, because she’d been assumed to be with Cain the whole time. It was possible that this was some kind of experiment. Iris pulled her stiff, starched blankets over her head, shivering. She’d stuffed her contraband into the toilet tank, trying to touch it as little as possible. Whatever else it was, the thing was clearly cursed. Or maybe Iris herself was cursed, she thought, a bit melodramatically. Maybe he’d always be haunting her.

And he didn’t even have the decency to stay inside her head, now. She’d seen his awful, ghoulish face, heard his voice in her head. How was that possible? Was she going crazy? Was it some kind of illusion, a photo that showed you your worst nightmare? She’d never heard a photo speak before. And where _was_ he, if it was really him? What the hell sort of photo was this? It couldn’t be real.

She couldn’t stop turning it over in her mind, trying to make the pieces fit together. If she asked Cain about the number on the locker she’d pilfered him from - pilfered _it_ from, she reminded herself - he would be suspicious. So she couldn’t do that. She could do some elite computer hacking, but Iris didn’t know squat about computers, so she quickly dismissed that. She could ask...the thing. She almost whimpered at the thought, but part of her relished it. She couldn’t have anticipated that. Part of her _wanted_ to look at him. It was the call of the void, she supposed. Maybe she’d get some good potshots in. That had kept her occupied for a few months when she was sixteen: thinking of insults she wanted to deliver if she ever saw his fucking face again.

Iris sighed and rolled over. If she tossed and turned for too long, someone would poke their head in the door to check on her. She had to decide now.

Except it wasn’t a decision, really. Iris simply felt herself rising and she shuffled into her little bathroom. The bathroom was the most depressing part of her cell: the doorknobs, the coat hook, and the showerhead all swiveled down if you pulled on them hard enough, so you couldn’t hang anything too heavy from them without it sliding off. Iris had realized early on that this was really meant to prevent the hanging of one specific object: the body of the cell’s occupant. Next to the toilet tank, someone had used a paperclip or something similar to scratch the word _fuck_ into the wall. No secret messages, no helpful tips, no words of encouragement. Just _fuck._ She occasionally wondered what had happened to _fuck_ , but she suspected she already knew.

She sat down on the toilet. She turned and took the lid off the toilet tank - thank God for outdated plumbing. She settled the lid on her lap, then reached back again and drew out the object. She cradled it in her palm, and held it in front of her. Again, there was something odd about the quality of the photograph. It was certainly photorealistic, but it didn’t look _real_. It was like a dream or a hallucination, but viewed through a square of paper.

The Able figured started to move again, and Iris’s heart hammered. He’d gone back to his original position while the photo had been languishing in the toilet, but now he lifted his face to look at her once again. His eyes were the worst part of him. Otherwise, he would have been quite handsome: a stern brow, an aquiline nose, a strong jaw. But the eyes were cold and lifeless and cruel.

Iris heard his voice again, or perhaps she felt it, rising into her mind against her will like the nonsensical thoughts that often occurred before dreams.

 _You return to face me at last._ The picture’s mouth moved, but it was slightly out of sync with the voice in Iris’s head. He held his fists clenched at his sides.

“What are you?” whispered Iris, voice trembling. She wondered if he could even hear her.

_Have I been forgotten so soon? Ah, don’t play games! What strange prison is this? How have you managed it?_

He sounded remarkably sedate, for Able, as if he were drugged or half-asleep. He was certainly more agreeable than the last time Iris had seen him.

“I found a picture of you,” she said. “But you’re not him, are you? You’re some kind of magic copy or something.”

 _No copy,_ said Able. She’d almost forgotten about his bizarre accent. He was glowering, now. It was strange: instead of making her think of the last time they’d spoken, seeing him now reminded Iris of earlier times, when they had almost established a rapport. _I feel my body...but I am elsewhere. This is powerful magic, girl. You have no idea what you have done._ He shook a fist.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Iris tremulously. “I just found the picture. And I can see into it, but you’re not anywhere real.”

 _No,_ said Able. _I am in two places at once. This is a photograph?_

“Yes,” said Iris.

 _Curses!_ Able spat. _I know who did this. It was those foolish men of science and their toy. I do not recall what it was meant to do. They took my picture, many years ago. It would seem that your abilities have taken me...elsewhere._ He seemed genuinely confused.

“Fuck you,” said Iris, abruptly. Her voice was slightly hoarse.

Able stared. _What-_

“Fuck. You.”

 _You_ dare _to speak to me in such a way?! Whelp, I am your better! I will tear out your heart and eat it! I will-_

It was obvious now that Able couldn’t touch Iris from here; he was hopping and shouting, but he couldn’t do anything more. It was honestly pretty gratifying to watch.

“You’re a bastard,” Iris continued. “I hate you. And I’m going to burn this photo.”

_WAIT!_

“What? What could you say to me? You have no idea what you’ve done to me.” Iris was shaking again. The miniature Able glared at her.

_You are the one who does not understand. There are forces at work-_

“It’s always the forces at work with you people!” Iris sputtered. “You killed all my friends! I’ve been locked up for ten fucking years!”

 _As have I!_ Able snarled. _And I would dare to say that your fate has been pleasant compared to mine. Do they drown you? Electrocute you? Play dirty tricks to get the upper hand, then gut you alive, fighting like cowards?_

“I don’t care what happens to you,” hissed Iris. “You’re evil. Goodbye.”

_Iris! Do not- ! Do not put me back in that box!_

There was something there. Something genuinely pained, something almost anxious, like a dog shying away from a threat. He hunched his shoulders, almost a defensive posture. Almost.

 _Do not destroy the image. Do not run from me. I see it in your face - you have grown fierce._ He tilted his head, examining her, and she wondered how much of her he could see. _You were never as weak as the others._

“I’m not fierce. I’m...nothing. I’m broken. Are you happy? You should have killed me.” Iris could feel her heartbeat in her temples. Her vision blurred, but not with tears.

 _Enough!_ Able folded his arms, tapping his fingers irritably against his elbow. _Do not pity yourself. It is a lie. I made you strong. Be angry if you must, but do not whine and snivel like a dog!_

“Shut up! Aren’t you the one begging for your life now?”

_No. I do not beg. I will tell you what you must do: ally yourself with me once more. Together, we can escape this Foundation. Let us regain our freedom._

Iris shook her head the whole time he was speaking. “You must be stupid if you think I want that. I would never free you after what you’ve done. You showed everyone just how little you care for human life. I won’t sacrifice anyone else.”

 _Some sacrifices are necessary,_ said Able. He took a half-step back, maybe to look at her more fully. _You want to languish here for the rest of your days? You will never test your abilities. You will live and die in this room. What more could you do, if you were free?_

Iris had thought about that. How many other girls like her were living the way she was now, or worse? Knowing no one was coming for them, alone and scared?

“If I’m remembering right,” said Iris, “you liked training me because I said _no_ to you sometimes.”

Able grinned. _You did not rush to please me. The others always bowed their heads. You cried like a child, but you looked me in the eye._

“Well, I’m saying _no_ again. Goodbye.” And Iris dropped the photo back into the toilet. She heard half a bellow of rage before she wasn’t touching the paper anymore and she heaved a sigh, putting the lid back on the toilet tank. She got up and washed her hands. One thing at a time, she told herself. She returned to her bed and lay down again, burying her face in her single lumpy pillow.

Damn him. She knew, vaguely, what Able’s containment procedures entailed. They were nasty. Either they were causing him genuine distress, or they were still unpleasant enough for him to pretend they were. Could she, in good conscience, doom him to a short eternity of drowning in a dark box? Even if he was the worst sort of evil? Even if he deserved it?

She had, possibly, either a great tool or a great danger on her hands. If he was serious about wanting to stay out of the box, maybe she could use him. If that happened to humiliate him in the process, where was the harm? If, however, he was toying with her...but was Able really smart enough for manipulation? He wasn’t ever patient or subtle. He was blunt and belligerent and fought in a straight line from beginning to end unless he died along the way. Well, except for once. Iris lay in bed, eyes closed, thinking, until Dr. Lindstrom came to get her for breakfast.

 

* * *

 

_January 12, 2010_

 

Iris sighed heavily and sat down on one of the gymnasium-style benches that had been placed against the walls of the training yard (which was a room, not a yard, but called that anyway). She was sweating profusely. Today’s drills had been especially brutal. Iris watched as Able kicked one of his teammates in the ankles so he toppled backwards, head just barely missing the mat they were sparring on and cracking against the concrete floor with a noise that made Iris wince. Everyone turned to look, but he sat up, rubbing the back of his head. Able snarled some insults, but she was used to tuning them out by now.

“Iris,” he snapped, snapping his fingers at her like he was summoning a dog. She stood obediently and came to his side. He kept his eyes focused on the man he was training: Jenkins was his name, a decorated soldier before he’d joined their ranks. He’d been selected for his extraordinary combat prowess, but of course Able was dissatisfied. “Jenkins is having some bit of trouble with his attacks. We will go again, and for each round that he fails to make a hit, you and I will go one round after.”

Jenkins’s eyes went wide. “Really? I can keep going. But Iris is just a kid, and she’s tired.” Iris nodded gratefully.

Able scoffed. “Iris is also a soldier now. But if you want her to rest, simply fight _harder_.”

Iris swallowed back tears. Sparring with Able was always awful; he took her down way too hard and spat insults at her the whole time. She didn’t look at Jenkins. It wasn’t his fault. She simply backed away - out of striking range - and waited, shoulders slumped defeatedly.

To Jenkins’s credit, he managed to punch Able in the liver as he was being grappled to the floor in the next round. Able popped back onto his feet. “Again,” he insisted. No acknowledgment of Jenkins’s accomplishment, of course. Jenkins achily rose, panting. This time he charged at Able and was struck down in an instant. Iris winced.

Able didn’t bother to watch Jenkins get up this time. He simply turned to Iris. “Come,” he said. “Ready yourself.”

It wasn’t like she had a choice. She shuffled over to take Jenkins’s place while he took hers, face drawn. The others, sparring in pairs, had noticed their little game, but no one was worried enough to intervene yet. Apparently.

She stood facing Able. His grey eyes chilled her. He was unnaturally still. Which one of them would make the first move? Iris, she decided. Might as well get it over with. She made a tiny movement toward the left, and Able flung himself at her, but it was a feint. She dropped low as fast as she could and rammed herself into his legs. He genuinely hadn’t expected that; he staggered and fell. He was on his feet again in an instant, fists clenched, but his back had touched the mat.

“That one goes to Iris,” said Jenkins mildly, but she could hear the smug pride in his voice. She felt triumphant. It was so rare that any of them got one over on Able, and Iris had certainly never managed it before.

Able spat. “Even the most feeble have luck in combat some days. Were this a real fight, you would be dead and fed to the crows, who would not even grow fat on your corpse.”

Iris frowned, her happiness evaporating. It was obvious she’d wounded his pride, and he was reacting as always: by throwing a tantrum. “I still knocked you over,” she said quietly.

Able glared at her. “You think to brag to me?”

Iris’s pulse raced, months of resentment starting to simmer under the surface. “I’m being honest. You never admit it when you lose.” She could see Jenkins shaking his head frantically, now, but it was too late; Iris was starting to boil over.

Able’s eyes went wide. “Watch your tongue!” he shouted. The nearest pair of grappling agents had stopped what they were doing, watching the scene unfold.

“Why should I? You don’t!” Iris was shouting now, arms at her sides, shaking. “All you do is call us names and yell! I’m not just going to stand here and be insulted like that by some big, greasy, sneering asshole!”

The room was abruptly silent. All eyes were on them. Able looked stunned. Iris shut her eyes, breathing hard, hot tears rolling out of the corners and wetting her cheeks.

And then...she heard Able _laugh._ She opened her eyes. It wasn’t the cold, sarcastic chuckle he weaponized on them most of the time, but a sound of genuine mirth. He stopped cackling and grinned at her. “That is what I like to hear!” He strode over to her and squeezed her upper arm hard enough to hurt, but Iris bit her tongue. “You have fire in your blood! Now, this is why they sent you to me!”

His approval was so foreign that Iris found it was more bewildering than anything else. Crisis averted, the room hummed around them once again. Iris sniffled.

“Jenkins,” Able called. “Again.”

 

* * *

 

The next day passed in a light fog. Iris didn’t see Cain at breakfast, but he was sometimes absent. He’d told her once that he sometimes meditated in the mornings. Still, the timing was unfortunate. It made her nervous. Maybe he was trapped in a meeting, trying to explain why he’d let Iris steal from a secure locker. Her heart sank. She hadn’t even thought about what they might do to Cain.

But he was back at lunch. She sat down and he greeted her pleasantly. Iris knew she must look awful, exhausted and shaken.

“I, um…”

“Are you alright? You look a bit pale.” Well, that was fast. Iris sighed.

“I have, uh...cramps.”

Cain nodded seriously. “I’m very sorry.”

Iris smiled and tried not to avoid eye contact. “Eh, it’s not that bad.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Cain. This was awkward. Oh, God. They needed to escape this route of conversation. Iris kept her eyes fixed on Cain’s very, very depressing chicken breast when she spoken next.

“I need to ask you something.”

“And I’ll answer, if I can.”

“It’s sort of an...elephant in the room situation.”

“Ah.”

Iris peeked at his face. He didn’t look concerned. “Cain. Are you who I think you are?”

Cain blinked at her. “It’s very likely.” Okay. It was like talking to a magic 8-ball sometimes. But he was tapping the edge of the table rhythmically with one hand in what passed for agitation with him.

“So that mark on your forehead is-”

Cain shook his head rather abruptly, not in a “no”, but as though he were trying to shake wasps out of his brain. He lifted his hands in front of him, fingers spread in quiet supplication. His brow crumpled with pain.

“No, not that. I will not speak of it, Iris.” He seemed genuinely quite upset; it startled her. She’d touched a raw nerve in him. It was more emotion than she’d seen him express since they’d met. He dipped his head toward his chest; he looked for all the world like he expected a beating.

“Are you…” A monster? An immortal? A fratricide? “...okay?” Iris thought about touching one of his gloved hands, but decided not to risk it.

Cain’s face cleared. He sighed heavily and splayed his palms on the surface of the table. “I am. Thank you.” But he looked intensely worried still, eyes downcast. He swallowed.

So this is the face of sin, thought Iris. There was some ironic point to be made about good and evil here, she was sure, but she was too tired to think of it. If the stories were true, surely Able must have done something to provoke him. Right?

“I’m glad that’s out of the way, at least,” said Iris.

Cain nodded, frowning. “Perhaps it is best to be frank with one another.” She expected he’d add on to that, but he didn’t.

They ate the rest of their meal in silence.

 

* * *

 

_June 2, 2010_

 

Dying wasn’t so bad, thought Iris. She’d always assumed that bleeding out would hurt worse than it did. She mostly just felt tingly and floaty. The hole ripped in her side hurt, but dimly. She shut her eyes, resting on the concrete floor of the enormous warehouse they were trapped in. She’d known she was dead when she’d gotten separated from the group.

And to think this was supposed to be a low-risk recon job. Of course there had to be monsters. There were always monsters.

When Iris felt herself being manhandled, she assumed that one of the things had come back to finish the job. But increasingly it felt like she was being moved, maybe carried. Something solid was pressing into her stomach. Was this Hell?

She heard a voice, a man’s voice, shouting, and then she was being dropped rather unceremoniously from a height, onto something scratchy. She kept her eyes closed. She was tired. Could this be over soon?

“Fix it!” the man was shouting.

A woman’s voice answered. “Okay. Shit. This is bad. She’s lost a lot of blood. I don’t know how much I can-”

“Did I ask for your ramblings? Fix her, or I will cut off your head and toss it to the wolves!”

Iris tried to speak, but only managed to rasp weakly.

“Let me get- okay, here.”

Then something was pushing itself into her mouth. She tried to spit it out. Fingers, she realized. The fingers left something small and hard behind. “Iris, honey, you need to swallow.” The voice sounded so kind, but Iris wasn’t sure she remembered how swallowing worked. She would try. Iris sucked, choked briefly, and managed to swallow.

“What now?” asked the angry, demanding man.

“We wait. It’s supposed to work on any condition. Blood loss is a condition. I’ll close the wound. Ah, Jesus-” Then Iris passed out.

When she awoke, she was lying on top of a sleeping bag in the back of a van. The doors were open, and their medic, Sonya, was sitting next to her, legs dangling out of the back. No one else was in sight. Iris groaned and cleared her throat. Sonya swiveled to look at her quickly.

“Hey! How do you feel?” Her brow was creased with concern. It felt nice.

“Tired,” said Iris. “My side hurts. I can’t believe I let myself get separated.”

“It was pretty chaotic in there,” said Sonya. “I’m going to have to look at that wound. Don’t sit up.” Sonya pulled her legs up and knelt at Iris’s side, pulling her shirt up.

“Is everyone okay? Are the others-”

“Everyone is fine,” said Sonya. Okay, that’s not bad. It’s not totally healed, but five-hundred definitely helped.”

“The magic pills?” said Iris. “You used one?”

“Yeah,” said Sonya. “Had to. We couldn’t risk losing you.” She pulled Iris’s shirt back down.

“How did I get out?”

“Able went back for you,” said Sonya, shrugging. “He took off when we realized you were gone. He carried you out.”

“He did?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“No idea,” said Sonya, pulling a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from her bag. “I don’t think anyone will ever know what motivates him. I guess he realized you weren’t an acceptable casualty.”

 

* * *

 

 

Iris’s next day of work with Cain went much the same way as the first, but with no cursed photographs. She was lethargically stacking together another morass of old receipts that evidently no one had ever written off, but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking, specifically, about how Able had taunted her. Languishing, he’d said. It was true. She was languishing. Having one friend couldn’t erase the fact that she’d never do much of anything with her life ever again. Never again would she be challenged, mentally or physically. Somehow that fact just never got less depressing.

Iris looked across the table at Cain, who was examining some yellowing spreadsheets she’d found for their possible relevance. She heaved a sigh. “This sucks,” she said.

Cain looked up. “What?”

“My life.”

Cain raised an eyebrow. “Yes, we’ve discussed this. What sucks about this particular part of it?” He was...was he teasing her? A tiny smile tugged at his mouth. He was.

“I’m just thinking...about how I’m never really going to be able to do anything challenging with myself. My brain is going to turn to paste. And I’m all noodly now! I’d die if I tried to lift a box or something.”

Cain looked thoughtful. “If you’re worried about your conditioning, perhaps we could work toward a solution to that.”

Iris sighed. “It’s not the same, lifting weights in my room or something. There’s no...point. If I have any goals for myself, they’re fake. I’m just waiting to die. I feel like a ghost.” She knew she was being self-indulgent; she didn’t care.

“You’re living your life,” said Cain. “I enjoy our friendship. The staff regard you quite highly. Your work is helpful to me, and to the Foundation.” He folded his hands on top of a stack of papers.

Iris paused for a moment. “How tall are you?”

“Six foot one. Why?”

“I have no idea how tall I am. I don’t know my dress size. I only know how old I am because I get a bran muffin every time I have a birthday, and I’ve had ten bran muffins since they put me away. I’m twenty-five, but I don’t feel any different than I did at fifteen. It’s like I just...stopped.” She took a deep breath. “They’re erasing me, Cain.”

“I am sorry.”

“Are you? How much of yourself have you lost over the years? How much _you_ do you have left to lose?” Cain recoiled. She’d hurt him. Fuck.

“I’m sorry,” said Iris. “I didn’t mean that. I’m an idiot. I’m just…”

“Frustrated,” Cain finished. “And you make a fair point. One could say that I have...pieces missing. Are you familiar with the fable of the ship of Theseus?”

“No,” said Iris.

“It is a thought experiment. As it goes, there is a ship. Each day, one board is replaced with another. At what point is the original ship now a different ship, owing to its reconstruction? And if it is still the same ship, why? What is the essence of the ship? Where does it reside?”

“Maybe I’m not the same ship I was when I came here.” Iris swang her legs.

“Perhaps. And perhaps they can’t take that from you. Not ever.”

“Thank you,” said Iris softly. “And I’m sorry. For being like I am. All I ever do is complain and accidentally insult you and bitch about the Foundation.” She shook her head.

Cain smiled. “Self-awareness is the first step. In seriousness, Iris, it’s reasonable that your mental health might be…”

“Bad?” said Iris.

“Strained. You’ve been through trauma and a period of prolonged isolation. I’m not expecting you to be...perfect. I’ve seen people turn out far worse than perhaps a few faux pas after going through less.”

Iris frowned. “It’s more than that,” she said. “There’s something different inside me.” _I think about hurting people, and I know how to do it. I am so, so angry. Sometimes I think the anger will burn me alive and there’ll be nothing left._

“There always is, day by day,” said Cain. “We’re not doomed to be one way or the other so long as we still have will to change.” He pulled something out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. A granola bar, she realized. What? “I brought you this snack,” he said proudly. “You should eat something.”

Iris felt herself smile. “Thanks.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Q: Does Cain carry around a Tactical Emergency Snack to deploy in the event of emotional turmoil?  
> A: Yes.
> 
> In case it's not totally clear: the photo is the product of SCP-978. Since the locations in the pictures aren't real, Iris is basically seeing into a place that only exists in the minds of the subjects. Able's body is still in his coffin, but she's interacting with his mind. Next chapter: shit is really about to go seriously sideways. Also, more flashbacks.


	6. Like Old Friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter contains a depiction of SELF-HARM and MILD GORE. It also contains a depiction of what I would describe as an abusive mentor/mentee relationship.

Iris lifted the polaroid back out of the toilet tank. It was getting pretty soggy at this point, but it was structurally intact. She spoke first, this time.

“Do you just go back when I stop holding the photo?”

_ I assume so,  _ said Able, crossing his arms.  _ I do not fully remember. My body is still healing. _

“Hmm,” said Iris. “If I reached into the photo, I wonder if I could poke your actual body.”

Able frowned.  _ And use your tools to free me? _

“No, just to annoy you.”

He scowled, his brows dipping heavily.  _ You were not once so frivolous. _

“Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t have killed everyone I cared about.”

Able raised his chin defiantly. The gesture made Iris’s heart pound. Usually, that meant trouble. She reminded herself that he couldn’t touch her from where he was.  _ Be silent. My actions were only to your benefit. _

“How?” Iris wanted to laugh. He was so delusional. Did he expect her to thank him for all that he’d ruined?

_ Listen to how you speak to me,  _ Able said, smiling smugly.  _ You mock me openly. Before, you would have cowered and wept. Now you have no fear. _

“Maybe,” said Iris. She realized she was learning rather a lot about Able and how he saw the world. “And what about them? What about making  _ them _ strong? They were your soldiers!"

Able shrugged.  _ Not worth it.  _ So cold. So callous. Like he’d weighed the benefits and costs and potential outcomes and decided to liquidate. Had she been his pet project all along? Or was he coming up with excuses, rationalizing to himself? He hadn’t seemed calm or controlled. He’d been half-crazed with rage. Iris wondered what else he’d admit if she pushed him. After it had happened, all she’d wanted to know was  _ why. Why kill them? Why not me? Why do you hate us so much? _

“I saw your brother,” said Iris. Able froze. Oh, there it was, the terrible stillness of a stalking jaguar about to pounce. Before he got angry, he got quiet.

_ What. _

“I saw Cain,” said Iris. “Did he really kill you?” Her hands shook. She knew what she was doing. Able had no idea where she was, Iris reminded herself, fending off a stab of guilt. He’d have no way of knowing where to find Cain.

Able got as close as he could to her, steely eyes flashing.  _ What did he tell you?! What did he say?! _

“About you? Nothing,” said Iris. “How did he do it? With a rock, or did he cut your head off with a backhoe?”

Able yelled.  _ Where is he?! Take me to the traitor!  _ He was thrashing madly, clearly infuriated by his powerlessness.

“What are you going to do? You’re a photograph,” said Iris. Able appeared to be breathing hard, clutching at the air. It was the gesture he made when he drew a weapon, Iris realized. He didn’t have that option now.

_ You cannot claim to know my mind,  _ he said. That was Able-speak for “I don’t know.”  _ Are you conspiring with him against me? Has he made a traitor of you, too? _

“ _ Me  _ a traitor?!” Iris choked. “You killed your own men! You have no loyalty to me, why would I have any to you?”

_ Don’t pretend you don’t know what I could give you. Don’t pretend that anyone you’ll meet in that prison of yours will do for you what I can. Do you remember fighting? Do you remember? And you give that all up so easily, for some false sense of justice!  _ He was gnashing his teeth.  _ See what I have done for you! Understand that it made you strong! Stand at my side once more! _

It was interesting, seeing how he acted when he could only use his words. It made him seem almost desperate.

“Stand by yourself,” said Iris. “It’s what you’re good at.”

* * *

_ November 1, 2010 _

 

Able had been quiet lately. That was worrisome. He was usually terse, but not usually silent. Silence meant he was retreating into whatever was going on inside his head. Iris, who’d stepped out of their training session to drink from a water bottle, watched him patrolling silently, observing his team practice disarming each other. He looked bored. That also wasn’t good.

“Stop!” said Able. They stopped. “This is pointless. Worthless. You are all worthless. A goat cannot become a lion.”

Iris licked her lips. He’d been increasingly prone to these rants, these bouts of apparent hopelessness at their frailty. “What do you want us to-”

“Don’t yap at me!” Able snapped, whirling on his heel to glare at her. One of his hands had wandered up to tap at the metal collar around his neck. “Your feebleness is...disgusting.”

Iris folded her arms. Apparently that was the wrong answer. Able drew a blade, a curved scimitar, and twirled it casually. 

“Able,” said Iris, shrinking. “What do you want us to do?”

Able cocked his head at her. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t slaughter you all right now. You have become tedious.” There was a quiet click as someone pulled a weapon and aimed it at the back of his head. Able grinned in response and took a half-step toward Iris.

“You don’t want to do that,” said Iris, but her voice came out breathier than usual.

“Oh, I very much do,” said Able. More weapons being drawn, now. Iris pleaded with her comrades with her eyes:  _ Let me talk him down. _

“If they get you back into containment, you won’t get out again. No more fighting, no more eating, nothing.” Iris tried so hard not to tremble.

Able toyed with his blade. He was a showman. He’d never admit it, but he was. “So much faith you have.”

“You’ll be bored to tears in there.”

“I am bored to tears now.” He seemed to be waiting for her to speak again.

“That’s-” Iris cleared her throat. “Don’t be cowardly.” Able glared at her.

“You,” he hissed, low and dangerous, “will learn to hold your tongue when you speak to me.” He was advancing on her slowly. When did they engage? That was always the question. If they fired, they risked irritating him and triggering a full-blown incident. If they held their fire, they wouldn’t get the first few rounds in before he started killing. If he started killing.  _ No _ , thought Iris. It didn’t have to be too late.

“You’re going to run away from some discomfort? Taking the easy way? You don’t usually do that.” God, he was so much taller than her. She took a half-step backward. “No,” said Iris. He seemed to consider. “Please,” she whispered.

Able lifted his blade to his own throat, sliding it under the collar, grinning his hollow grin. Iris tried not to remember the rest. She wasn’t good at it. He’d left her for last, after all. Then he was backing her against the wall, scimitar glistening with blood, eyes on fire, advancing, advancing. Iris cowered. Still she didn’t cry. She couldn’t. It felt like her soul was floating six feet outside of her body. Able raised his blade and placed it against her throat. She looked into his flint-gray eyes. They were glassy and wild, and his chest heaved as he panted like an animal. He pressed down, and Iris cried out in pain...and then he was gone. He moved so quickly he was almost a blur. Iris staggered, reaching to touch the thin line of blood across her throat. He’d left. Left her there, surrounded by the dismembered corpses of her fellows, silent with shock.

It wasn’t until Iris had used her abilities to escape back to Site-17 - the most impressive thing she’d ever managed, and ever would - that the tears finally came.   
  


* * *

 

Iris couldn’t stop thinking about him. It. Whatever. The photo. She needed to get him out of her head, but she couldn’t. She wanted to wring everything she could out of him first. Iris tried to put herself to bed without looking at him, but she tossed and turned, unable to rest. Defeated, she got up and returned to the bathroom to retrieve the metaphorical albatross around her neck.

_ What now?  _ said Able, folding his arms when he saw her.  _ More insults?  _

“Do you want some?” asked Iris. They stared at each other in awkward silence for a moment, at an impasse.

_ It is time to make your choice, _ said Able.

“I’ve made it,” said Iris.

_ If you had made it,  _ said Able,  _ you would not keep returning to me. _ Iris bit her lip.

“I guess I keep expecting you to say something that’ll satisfy me.”

_ I cannot placate you. No more words. Action is what is needed.  _ Able jabbed a finger pointedly.

“I can’t do anything,” said Iris. “I’m not going to abandon this facility to you, not even if it means escaping. I’m not like you. I’m not a lone wolf. I need people around.” She exhaled shakily.

_ Have you learned nothing?  _ Able scoffed.  _ You do not need anyone.  _

“I needed  _ you _ ,” Iris whispered. It was the first time she’d admitted it, even to herself. Able was a monster. But he’d taken a timid little girl and taught her how to survive, because in his eyes there was little difference between a teenage girl and a hardened veteran. And then, when she’d gotten used to surviving, he’d taken that from her. He’d taken  _ himself  _ away, the power and fearlessness that Iris had coasted in the wake of.

_ Then free me. Face me, Iris, in the flesh. _

Iris shook her head. Able had given her, not strength, but a very specific set of tools. They were tools that he himself had used so long that he’d forgotten how to put them down. There was something sad in it, something futile.

_ Listen closely: it will be easier than you think. You will not need to free my body to make use of my abilities.  _ Able moved closer, speaking urgently.

That sounded ominous. “If you wanted me to even think about it,” Iris lied, “You’d have to do something for me first.”

_ What?  _ Able scowled.

“Tell me you care about me.”

Able stared at her, uncomprehending.

“Tell me you want to protect me. Tell me you like me, even.” Iris gave a dizzy giggle at his flabbergasted facial expression. “That’s what I thought.” Then she put him back where he belonged.

When she woke up in the morning, it was to Reynolds rapping on the wall next to her bed. She’d slept uncharacteristically late. 

“Appointment today, Iris,” drawled Reynolds. Iris mumbled something blearily and struggled to her feet, rubbing her eyes. She stumbled after him, wanting to get this over with so she could go back to sleep. She was tired, the sort of bone-deep exhaustion that eight hours couldn’t fix. She felt drained. Maybe Able was sucking the life force out of her. It would be just her luck.

Iris got an impassive nod from the guard as she entered the cell for her psych appointment. She dropped herself into the chair, suddenly realizing that the legs were slightly uneven, and the chair wobbled irritatingly from side to side. Dr. Tremblay was on the other side of the plexiglass window, as expected. Iris put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.

“How are you feeling today, one-oh-five?” she said, looking at her papers rather than at Iris.

“Fine,” said Iris.

Tremblay cleared her throat. “In the past week, please rate how often you’ve had the following experiences on a scale of one to five, with one being ‘not at all’, and five being ‘every day’.” Iris fought the urge to roll her eyes.

“Low or depressed mood.”

“Two,” said Iris.

“Thoughts of suicide.”

“One.”

“Diminished appetite.”

“Three.”

“Sleeplessness or excessive sleeping.”

“Three.”

“Irritability.”

“Two.”

“Anxiety or panic.”

“One.”

“Thank you.” Tremblay adjusted her glasses.  _ What is it like on that side of the glass, Doctor? _ Iris wondered.  _ Is it lonely over there? Or are you just free? _ “Now, one-oh-five. How has your new appointment been treating you? Last time we spoke, you gave me the impression you were enjoying yourself.”

“I guess,” said Iris. Something about these appointments always made her feel like a teenager having an awkward conversation with a parent.

“Is that still true?”

“Yup,” said Iris.

“And what about seventy-three? How has he been? Do you think he values you as a partner?” Tremblay leaned forward slightly. So she was actually interested in this answer. That was worrying.

“I have no idea,” said Iris. “He doesn’t share that much with me.”

Tremblay frowned. “Your relationship is more professional?”

“Yeah,” said Iris. “I mean, I like him a lot. But it’s not like we’re close.”

Tremblay clicked her tongue. “Hmm. I’m sure he’ll be disappointed to hear that.”

For just a moment, Iris’s heart beat fast. She thought of Cain’s little frown when he heard that Iris didn’t see him as a friend. And then she smiled. She sat forward herself. “Doctor,” she said, “do you really think that after all these years I can’t tell when I’m being manipulated?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Tremblay coolly. 

“You’re not that good,” said Iris. “I mean, you are. For a normal person. But I talk to liars like you every day. You all have the same tricks. It’s honestly kind of sad. It’s been so obvious for weeks that you just want me to tell you about Cain. Well, there’s nothing to tell. So ask me about my bowel movements or whatever and let me go.”

Tremblay pursed her lips. “I think I have what I need from you.” The door buzzed. Iris turned, perplexed, to see two guards entering the cell. That was never good. Could she run? No. She was fast, but they were two abreast. She’d have to disarm one, and they were at an advantage, with her sitting down with her back to them. In the Omega-7 days she might have managed it. She’d have acted as soon as the door started to open. She was too late now. 

One man came to stand at each of Iris’s sides, their hands on her shoulders. “What the hell is this?” demanded Iris. She fought down the urge to struggle.

“I’m afraid that, due to a lack of applicable results, and due to staff being spread so thin - and recall how many staff it takes to cart you around the site - we’re going to have to rescind your extended privileges.”

Iris felt as if the word was tilting dangerously. “No, that’s...I’ll still be allowed in the cafeteria?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Tremblay, writing something in a notebook. “I’m sorry. The program was experimental. The hope was for…” Tremblay tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, smiling mildly, but Iris saw the venom behind it. “Something that didn’t materialize.”

“No,” said Iris, gasping. “You can’t do that!” But Tremblay merely stood to leave, and Iris felt herself being hoisted to her feet by the two guards. “No, please!” She did struggle now, but she was so much smaller than them, and they dragged her with such force that she was lifted an inch off the ground. “No!  _ No! You bitch!” _

The guards carried Iris out of the room and started to make their way down the hall in complete silence. “Cain!” Iris screamed. “Cain! No! Lindstrom!  _ Cain! _ ” Iris was almost blind with panic and rage. She drew a leg up and kicked a guard in the shin hard enough to stagger him, and he cursed quietly before righting himself and continuing down the hall. They had them very well trained.They ignored her screams until they arrived at her cell. 

“Please just let me talk to her one more time,” Iris pleaded. “Please. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“I want you to shut the hell up,” said Guard #1, and shoved her into her cell with such force that she fell and scraped her knees. The door slammed shut.

Iris knelt in the center of her cell for a moment, shaking. This couldn’t be happening. What had she done to deserve this?  _ What had she done wrong?  _ She couldn’t do this. Not again. Not days locked in her room by herself.

Iris screamed. She sat in the center of the floor and screamed, a broken animal sound. She screamed until her throat was raw, and then she called for Cain again, begging. It was no use. She knew it was no use. The cells were soundproofed. No one was coming. No one was coming and they’d taken away the only thing she’d had going for her,  _ again. _ She would never see Cain again. Not today, not ever. It was just this cell and the occasional trip down the hall to be patronized by an unfeeling woman, for the rest of her life. Iris was doubled over, hair falling over her sweaty forehead. No. She wouldn’t accept this. She was done letting others decide her fate for her. She was not going to let them take her dignity away. She stood up and staggered into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet, like always. She took the lid off the toilet. She rescued the soggy polaroid and held it up to her face.

“Just tell me you care even a little,” she choked, “and I’ll do whatever you want.” 

Iris went to bed that night at the same time as always. Before she lay down, she casually removed a pencil from her nightstand and tucked it into her pocket. She got as comfortable as she could and tried to relax, pulse throbbing. She slipped her palm into her pocket and, careful not to make too much movement, moved it down her body to tuck it into her waistband, under her clothes.

Then she waited, eyes closed, silently counting out the seconds, until 33 minutes past the hour. She didn’t need to worry about falling asleep; her heart was beating a mile a minute. It wasn’t cost-efficient to have personnel watching the cameras in the low-risk humanoid portion of the facility all day. That was one of the things she wasn’t supposed to know, like the fact that they lied about observing religious practices when someone died here. They incinerated the bodies.

Iris highly suspected that they would be checking the cameras every hour or half-hour. 33 minutes was a nice and odd time. Still, best to be careful. That was one thing she’d learned from Pandora’s Box: you can never over-plan.

Iris stirred, drew in a deep breath, and sat up. She blinked sleepily and stretched, as if waking from a sleep, and then stumbled blearily to her feet. She walked calmly to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. Then she backed herself into the corner next to the toilet, the little corner not covered by cameras. Still, she had to be quick. Take too long and anyone who happened to be watching might wonder what she was up to. Iris pulled the pencil out of her pants and bit down on the metal part until it started to loosen. She wiggled it free of the pencil and dropped the rest on the floor. She put the little metal circlet into her mouth and bit down again, bending the soft metal until she was able to unfold it into a flat piece. A piece with a sharp edge - or as sharp it was going to get. 

Breathe, breathe. It will be worth it. They’d brought this on themselves. She could see into the mirror from this angle, see the pale, shaking girl, and she hated herself for her weakness. The mirror was just a polished piece of metal bolted to the wall: no glass; if she broke it, she’d have weapons. She drew in a deep breath.  _ Go. Go. Go. _ She pictured him across the training yard, Able, tall and ferocious. Iris could do that, be an animal, if she had to. And, it seemed, she did. Iris pulled her shirt off over her head, leaving her in just a sports bra.

The first cut was the worst part. It wasn’t the pain so much as the realization that she was doing it, that there was no going back. The metal was so dull that it was more of a tearing than a cutting, and the lines were all wiggly. Over several hours, she’d memorized the markings so well that it almost felt as if she were outside herself, watching someone else’s hands do the work: pull skin taut, metal to flesh, press down hard, break the skin, drag a single line. Repeat. She worked in sections starting from the bottom, on her legs, with her pants rolled up. The occult glyphs were ugly, but Iris hadn’t cared about her appearance in years. Funny, she’d always admired them on  _ him _ .

Iris was marking her stomach, letting out little gasps of pain, when she started to realize that she’d been cutting a little too deep, high on adrenaline. She was bleeding badly now, enough to drip onto the floor under her. Shit. Finish the job. Quickly, now. After her stomach, she had to crane to reach her back. These ones were horribly uneven, even with the mirror. Oh, well. Close enough. Okay, chest. Most of the marks here were around the collarbones, and these hurt less than the softer parts of her body. She was panting shallowly. Her arms. Her fingers slipped, tacky with blood, and she nearly dropped her makeshift blade. She did her left arm first, and then she had to copy the design with her non-dominant hand. She’d pared down some of the ornamental aspects - this was ugly, rudimentary. Hopefully, functional. She was hacking at herself like she was carving a jack-o’-lantern. This was ugly. God, this was ugly. But Able was right: her capacity to tolerate pain was greater than she’d known.

Iris paused to take a breather. She was feeling light-headed. Was it fear, or had she bled that much? It didn’t matter. Almost done now. Iris tilted her head back and ripped a handful of lines up her throat, stopping at her chin, and then added the finishing touches, curling around her cheekbones.  _ Done.  _ There was blood in her mouth. Iris dropped the piece of metal. Her skin was on fire. Hollowed out, carved up, a prepared vessel. She suddenly thought of pottery she’d done in art class at school, using a toothpick to draw designs and then waiting for it to be fired. 

It hurt. It was going to hit her in earnest any second now. Already she was afraid to move for the pain she knew it would cause. Iris was in a cold sweat and she was shaking so hard that her teeth knocked together. She pled, with God, with no one, and she didn’t know for what. For once, someone answered.

When Able came to her, it was like her blood had been lit on fire. It was agonizing and ecstatic at once; Iris felt a rush of terrible power, exhilarating anger, like she had inhaled lightning. For a moment, she was convinced that she’d never want anything else. What else, who else, could free her like this? Iris felt his mind turning next to hers, a bloody tempest, felt her own body shifting without her: her back straightened, her stance widened, shoulders rolled back. The markings carved into her skin burned as they healed over in an instant, leaving silver-white scars behind. Able, son of Adam, met her eyes in the mirror, and he smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DUN DUN DUN. You ever get so fed up you carve esoteric Sumerian glyphs into your skin to let an evil warlord possess your body? Yeah, me too. Next chapter: You can probably guess what's about to happen.


	7. Containment Breach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! I got wrapped up in some stuff I'm writing for the Wikidot site and then I realized the plot of this chapter ended up absolutely riddled with holes and it took some doing to fix it. Warning: this chapter contains graphic violence!

The high wail of a containment breach alarm cut through the miscellaneous chatter in the cafeteria. For one moment, suspended in time, everyone froze. It was the pause that occurs after something bad has happened but before you’ve allowed yourself to believe it.

“Ah, shit,” said Dr. Lindstrom, standing up. “Ah, sh-”

A pleasant female voice cut through the sirens. “Attention: a containment breach has been registered on Floor: 1 in Section: 2. The site is now entering lockdown. Please observe lockdown protocol starting immediately.”

“This floor?” said Jones, reluctantly setting aside her dinner roll. “Low-risk humanoids? Someone must have fucked up a lock, or it’s a glitch or something.” She had to shout to be heard over the _crash_ of blast doors closing at intervals, sealing the facility.

People were already moving: to their pagers, or streaming toward the door that would take them out of the cafeteria and into the hallway where they could access the office space and their computers. It was never as well-practiced as a fire drill: someone was always a deer in the headlights, standing rigid, frozen in fear. This time, it was Lindstrom.

Jones noticed him dithering between moving and sitting down and shook his shoulder. “First breach? It’ll be fine. It’s probably not a big deal, I know the alarm makes it sound-”

The double doors to the cafeteria were flung open with a crash, and everyone inside turned to look.

Standing there was a young blonde woman, half-clothed in only a sports bra and scrub bottoms, completely drenched in blood. Her hair was clotted with it; it dripped down her legs, soaked her clothes. She had the intense, focused look of someone who was either in a life-or-death situation or righteously high on something.

“Nevermind,” said Jones, and sprinted from the room.

“ _Iris?_ ” Lindstrom gasped, braced against the table.

Iris swayed as if drunk or very tired; she staggered forward, blood-slick feet sliding on the linoleum. She stumbled forward before crashing into the table where Lindstrom stood, still undecided about whether to flee. Iris seemed to not even notice him: she was intent on the half-eaten meal on his tray. Iris scooped up a handful of mashed potatoes bare-handed and shoved it into her mouth, eating as if it were her first meal in months. Lindstrom was frozen with fear and dread. He was aware that something was terribly, horribly wrong, but he had no idea what to do about it. Run? Try to confront her? Tackle her to the ground? Lindstrom had suddenly realized something: some things they couldn’t prepare you for. 

“CLEAR THE AREA, DIPSHITS!” someone shouted. Iris stank of blood; it was a dark, metallic smell.

She didn’t look up. She finished the food on the tray in record time and drank a pint of 2% milk in 3 swallows before dropping the paper container to the floor. She spat once, and only then did she look up at the paralyzed, hovering doctor.

“Iris,” Lindstrom started feebly, before Iris reached for him with both hands and snapped his neck in a single swift jerk.

Only then did the response team burst through the door and train the barrels of three automatic assault rifles on Iris’s body. She whirled, eyes flashing with rage.

“On your knees! Now!” One of them shouted, hoisting his weapon.

Iris advanced. 

The one member of the team with her weapon holstered went in for a tackle. It was what she’d been trained to do with even violent Euclid-class anomalies: don’t damage the asset unless absolutely necessary. 

The guard was fast, but the asset was faster. 

The guard had almost gotten a hand on Iris’s upper body when the small girl reached out and abruptly crushed her throat with enough force to kill her almost immediately. Someone shouted. Three bullets hit Iris’s lower extremities. It was as if she hadn’t felt it; the wounds healed over in a matter of seconds. 

“Shoot to kill!” shouted one of the survivors.

The next bullet hit Iris in the chest before she reached the man who’d shot it and tore away the armor covering his torso. She shoved her hand through the center of his chest in a spray of gore, face alight with sinister pleasure. 

The man nearest her smashed the butt of his gun into her head; Iris seized him with one hand and tossed him bodily across the room, where he collided with the wall and slumped silently onto the ground, neck bent at an odd angle. The last one didn’t last long. He was aiming for the base of her skull with his weapon, but Iris was moving too fast to hit. She headbutted the offending guard in the face with enough force to crack his orbital bone, and then ripped his head from his body with a wet tearing sound.

Still the alarm sounded.

The blonde girl glanced around briefly, disinterested, and then strode out of the room.

 

* * *

 

Jones made it to Control sweating and gasping from her sprint. She’d imagined Iris on her heels the whole time, bloodied and furious. She’d gone back for Lindstrom just in time to see...something that no one could have expected. She’d deal with the survivor’s guilt later. First, they had to figure out what the hell was going on. 

The few who were there already looked up in surprise when Jones burst through the doors to Site-17 Control and then bent herself over the table, gasping.

“Jones. Nice to have you.” Dr. Jeremy Troutdale, an oily, unpleasant Junior Administrator, sat in front of a computer monitor, legs crossed, blinking at her with his beetly little eyes. “I’d guess you saw at least part of what just happened?”

The others in the room were markedly less calm than he was; people were making phone calls, typing furiously at computers, shouting. The breach alarm was migraine-inducing.

Jones straightened up and sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “One-oh-five is compromised,” she said. She tried to sound confident, but her voice wavered.

“Yes, obviously,” Troutdale said, rolling his eyes. “It just killed our primary response team. Four good people.” He didn’t sound that broken up about it.

Jones’s jaw dropped. “What?!”

“It’s either accessed another anomaly or manifested abilities we didn’t know about. The first seems more likely.” He rubbed his chin. “We’ve called in reinforcements, but it’s going to be a few minutes before they can group and mobilize.”

Jones frowned. This was, as people said, way above her pay grade. Her eyes drifted over to the bank of computers, where the assembled personnel were watching Iris on CCTV. She moved closer to look: a bloody woman was walking through the halls, moving at a leisurely saunter. 

“She’s going to escape,” choked Jones. “We weren’t prepared for this.”

“Well, it’s going the wrong way,” said Troutdale. “So we’ve got at least a little time, if that’s its intention.”

The doors opened again. A very flustered Dr. Tremblay stepped through, faintly out of breath. Her dark hair was starting to fall out of its neat bun.

Jones swallowed. “Did you hear what-”

“Yes, of course! God!” She dropped herself into a chair next to Troutdale, smoothing back her hair. The grainy, black-and-white Iris was still stalking the halls. She turned her head and froze suddenly at a door to a computer lab. 

Tremblay leaned in closer, taking off her glasses and hooking them into the collar of her blouse. “What is it…?”

It was the glass window in the door. She was looking at herself, moving her head forward and back like a bird being shown its reflection for the first time. She reached up to touch her nose, her cheeks, her lips. The exploratory hand touched her collarbone, and then came down to rest on a single breast. She looked down as if perplexed by this discovery and gave it a single, very deliberate jiggle.

“Fuck.” Jones exhaled. “Are we looking at a corporeal displacement here?”

“No,” said Tremblay, voice shivering.

“Looks like it,” said Troutdale. “It doesn’t recognize itself, or that isn’t what it expects to look like.”

“How did it get in? Where is the response team?” Tremblay was rubbing her temples almost frantically.

“Mobilizing now,” said Troutdale, consulting his phone briefly. 

“Wait.” Tremblay jolted forward suddenly so her nose was an inch from the screen. “Those marks. What are they?”

“The cuts?” Jones said.  “Some kind of glyphs, right? That’s probably how this happened.”

“We need semiotics to look at the footage.” Troutdale glanced at his phone again. “They just passed the gate. Finally.”

Tremblay shook her head. Her glasses slipped from the front of her shirt and landed on the floor. “I recognize those marks. I’ve seen them before. They’re the same as the ones on seventy-six.”

Troutdale licked his lips. “No. That makes no sense. Calm down. I know this is difficult for you, since _you_ were supposed to be monitoring one-oh-five..”

“Oh, shut up, you condescending windbag.” Tremblay pointed a finger at the CCTV, where Iris was continuing to explore a hall full of empty offices. “They are. I remember! I remember the line down the chin and the detailing around the wrists! There’s no mistaking it! Seventy-six did something!”

“Oh,” said Troutdale faintly. “That’s...bad.”

“Tell the response team to pull back,” said Tremblay, finally stooping down to pick up her glasses.

“What?”

“If this is...anything close to what it looks like, they’re as good as dead. Pull them out of there.”

“They-”

“We are not going to be responsible for such a waste of human life.”

Troutdale shook his head. “They still might be able to neutralize it.”

“A dozen men against _him_?” asked Tremblay. “No. They need to regroup.”

“It’s not- maybe one-oh-five just found a way to draw on the source of seventy-six’s abilities. You’re suggesting that it’s _actually_ here. In her body. In the building, with us.”

Tremblay cleared her throat. “Listen to me,” she said. “I have been Iris’s supervising psychiatrist for almost a decade. _I’m_ the one who interviewed seventy-six. I know what Iris looks like. I know how she walks, how she behaves. And I know what it looks like when someone isn’t themselves. I’m telling you, _that is not SCP-105._ That is a Keter-class anomaly _wearing her skin._ ”

“This is so messed up,” said Jones.

Troutdale sighed. He turned to a man sitting on his other side, who’d been murmuring quietly into a headset, giving orders. “Tell them to pull out immediately. And I mean _immediately._ ” The man looked confused, but nodded.

On camera, the tiny blonde woman was becoming agitated, now hunting more deliberately for the way out. It wouldn’t be long before he found it; he’d turned around and was coming back the way he’d come. If he moved in a straight line, he’d hit the doors soon. Jones guessed they had maybe ten minutes, tops.

“I have an idea,” said Tremblay. “A bit unorthodox, but so is this whole mess. We could use seventy-three. Have it provoke seventy-six into killing itself.”

“A sort of suicide” said Troutdale, doubtful. “You’re sure seventy-three wouldn’t be damaged?”

“I think,” said Tremblay, “that we have bigger things to worry about than the loss of our external hard drive. I need you to find oh-seventy-three.”

Troutdale turned back to his computer. He navigated quickly through a plethora of CCTV cameras, scanning the images. An empty hallway. A pile of corpses in the cafeteria. Another empty hallway. “I’ll just check…” Troutdale quickly entered an access code to bring up a locked camera feed. “Yes, he’s in his cell. No, he’s too far. He won’t be able to catch him.” In the other window, seventy-six had passed out of the camera’s range.

“How do I access the intercom system from here?”

Troutdale rose and led Tremblay over to the intercom panel. He punched in a few numbers on the control pad. “Hold down this button and talk.” 

Jones, for her part, remained sitting. She had her head in her hands, resigned. She was only half-watching, thinking of her family and her home and her dog, the things she might lose if this really went South.

Tremblay pressed the button, and the room was flooded with static, faint over the alarms that continued to blare.

“Cain?” she asked. A brief pause.

“Doctor? Are you interested in telling me what’s going on? I’ll do anything I can to help, but the doors to my cell are locked because of the breach.” His voice was difficult to make out between the static and the screaming alarms, but it held its usual composure.

“Your brother is here,” said Tremblay. There was a long pause.

“For me? Or for Iris?” He didn’t sound particularly surprised.

“Iris. He...we think he’s borrowed Iris’s body. That that’s how he escaped.”

“I...see.” There was a quiet, ghostly sigh.

“We aren’t prepared to deal with this here. He’s still trying to leave the facility, but we need you to stop him or so many people will die. _Please-_ ”

“Of course. I told you I’d do whatever I could.” Cain still sounded placid. Jones envied him.

“Thank you. We’re going to have to retract some of the blast doors to get you to him and that might require disabling the lockdown manually. We’ll keep an eye on you through the cameras.” Tremblay bowed her head.

“Doctor? Do you believe Iris is alive?”

“That’s...hard to say. You have to go quickly.”

“Of course.” On the computer monitor, Jones watched Cain stand up from where he was sitting on the edge of his bed. “Whenever you’re ready.”

 

* * *

 

Cain left his room and immediately stopped. He was still, unfortunately, sealed by blast doors into a stretch of hallway. Or perhaps it was fortunate: any malicious anomaly in his position would indeed have a difficult time escaping. Cain knew that the wings that held anomalies were sealed off with the blast doors; so were the labs. The other areas were locked into sections, but the doors were not reinforced so extensively and the locks could be overridden to allow personnel to pass through.

He stood there for several minutes, contemplating. He was losing time while he waited for the staff to retract the doors, but he might gain that time back in how long it would take Able to pry open the ones he needed to escape. They’d said Able was moving toward the exit through the center of the building, so his best chance was to head him off before he broke through the elevator and scaled the elevator shaft. And then…

They’d asked him to let Able do what he did best, to throw himself at Cain until he lay bloodied at his feet yet again. There was one crucial difference this time, however: Iris. It was unfortunate that she had to be involved in this.

The alarm abruptly cut out. It left the hall eerily silent. Then, with a sound like thunder, the blast doors retracted, and he could hear them doing so all through the facility. They’d had to disable the lockdown entirely, then, to get the doors open for him. That was unfortunate.

Cain took off at a sprint. He knew the route well: through the cafeteria, the left, then right, right again, and then go straight. It was the only way out or in. This time, the cafeteria contained a pile of corpses. Cain paused, skidding slightly, and dropped to his knees next to the one wearing the most protective equipment. It took him another precious minute to find what he was looking for, and then he was off again. Time. Cain had so much of it, but never where it was needed most.

Cain went left.

Cain went right.

Cain heard a scuffling sound, and slowed to a walk, moving silently on the balls of his feet.

Cain went right.

Cain stopped in front of the elevator and turned to put his back to the doors. Then he gave a loud, deliberate cough. His signal was heard: somewhere in the distance, a crash that could have been someone flipping over a table in a fit of childish pique. Cain pressed the call button on the elevator.

He heard a door open and shut then, and something else getting knocked over. Clumsy Able. He’d accidentally knocked a clay pot off a table once and made their mother cry. It had been her favorite, and she’d worked so hard shaping and coloring it.

“What am I to do with you, Able?” said Cain loudly. He spoke in _Emegir_ , a language so old that it felt dusty in his throat. A pause, and then the sound of frantic footsteps. There was an admittedly high-pitched bellow of rage.

“Cain! I know it’s you, sniveling traitor! Where are you?”

 Cain stepped backward into the elevator. The doors started to close just as he rounded the corner.

 _Oh,_ thought Cain. Iris looked terrible. She was bloody and butchered, but the worst part was her face, the look of alien rage there. He’d hollowed her out and made her body his vessel. How selfish. How greedy. That had always been his weakness. Their father and their Father had loved him too much to see it.

The elevator doors shut and he pressed the button for the ground level, swiping one of the key cards he’d pilfered from the dead guard. The other one would allow him to use certain Foundation vehicles. He would need that for the next step in his plan.

“ -fuck do you think you’re doing?!” A voice rather abruptly cut through the speaker in the elevator. Oh, yes. Them.

“I apologize,” said Cain. 

“You have to kill him!” Dr. Tremblay’s voice sounded high and shrill. Cain reached down and pulled off the tracking bracelet on his ankle; he’d broken the strap long ago, just in case. He’d known he wouldn’t be able to stay here forever.

“I apologize,” Cain repeated. “I can’t do that. I can’t allow Iris to die by my hand, not if there’s a chance of returning her life to her. But I can take Able away from here. He’ll follow me. You have my word.”

And with that, Cain arrived at the surface and prepared to move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's been reading and commenting! I think this chapter is the last you’ll see of my OCs shitting up the Foundation. Next chapter: Able gets dunked on. A lot.


	8. A Meeting of Minds

_Asshole. Fucking asshole. Backstabbing fucking piece of shit._

Able growled at the stream of mental abuse that echoed through his head in Iris’s clear, high soprano. He was trying to work up to a real rage, but it was impossible: she’d been going on like this for hours, and it was starting to fade into background noise.

_Can’t believe I trusted you. Again. I asked you for one thing and you couldn’t even give me that. You’re worse than Cain, and he fucking killed you._

Alright, that one did it. Able hopped aggressively over a tree that, having died, had tipped over into their path. “Stupid child! You know nothing! He’s been filling your empty head with lies!” Still unused to Iris’s body, he lost his balance and nearly pitched over into the dirt. Iris’s mental presence was distinctly unimpressed.

 _He wasn’t going to hurt you. He was just an idiot._ Iris sounded distinctly mournful.

Able could not for the life of him comprehend why she was so upset about the doctor he’d killed. He’d left the rest of them alive! She should have been grateful for his control! He tried his best to block out her voice and focused on his path. 

That path, at least, was obvious. Cain had commandeered a vehicle as soon as he’d reached the surface, and taken off into the desert. It was fortunate for Able that his mere presence was enough to leave a trail - in the form of dead and dying foliage. His aura of death and rot made it hard for him to hide. Able made a note to taunt him about that when he finally found him - all Cain had wanted before his crime was to create, to build cities and beget children. Now even the dirt around him was sterile. Able always thought that He should have taken Cain’s ability to have children, too. It would have made him so unhappy. Instead, he’d taken that from Able. It was something he just knew without having to be told, that his insides were as dry as dust. His legacy was to be one of death only.

_How many times have you done this? Tried to kill him? What makes this time any different?_

Able gritted his teeth and continued stomping along. He was beginning to resent the girl’s small stature; it made even walking a chore compared to his tall, strong body.

_And then what would you even do if you did kill him? Whoopee, revenge completed, cycle broken. Would you just let the Foundation kill you over and over?_

“Silence,” Able said. 

_Like a rat in a maze…_

“I said _silence!_ ”

And, for a while, there was silence, save for Able’s ragged breathing and the sound of feet against dirt and dry grass. In truth, he hadn’t much thought about what he would do after, if there was an after. His frantic bids for freedom weren’t conducive to introspection, nor was anything about Able himself. But the long trudge north was monotonous enough that he had time to think, try as he might to avoid such frivolity. And there, cursing as he was stuck in the foot with yet another thistle, a feeling emerged. It wasn’t much of a feeling, and anyway it was very, very close to his usual rage. It was probably only there because being in this woman’s body had already left him slightly unsettled. It was small, almost nonexistent, but it was there: it was doubt, a dark, gnarled knot of it.

_Have you even thought about why you’re actually doing this?_

“My reasons are my own!”

_No, they’re not. Whether it’s God or the Foundation, you’re just a slave serving another master. You’re only doing this because it’s part of His punishment. Because He brought you back to torture your brother with. You’re a tool._

Able gave a snarl of rage and was halfway to punching himself in the face for such insolence before he remembered that this would hurt him, as well. Still he struggled to refrain from violence. Insults were one thing, mockery was another, but _pity_ was inexcusable. And there it was, clear as the sunlight beating down on Able’s head: Iris pitied him. She saw him as a mindless marionette jerked about on celestial strings, something pathetic and tortured, like a rabid dog waiting to be put down. Able wanted to reach inside his own head and rip that pity out. He settled for digging Iris’s nails into her palm hard enough to draw blood.

 _I have nothing left to lose, so you know I’m telling the truth_.

“I hate you,” Able said.

_I know. You’re too weak to do anything else. You just hate things and swing a big sword around. Can you even read?_

Howling, Able pulled a fistful of grass out of the ground and hurled it in a gesture that even he could recognize as impotent. He hadn’t expected the idiot girl to still be there once he’d taken control of her body, and he certainly hadn’t expected her to be so...loud. What’s more, it was proving exceptionally difficult to intimidate someone who was already effectively dead. Able wasn’t used to being unable to intimidate someone. It was all wrong. And he could _feel_ her judgement, her scorn. Her hurt.

That last was the one he did his best to ignore. He’d never felt another being’s hurt before. It was cloying, suffocating. Being in this body was warping him. Also, he had breasts. That just wasn’t his style.

_How do you even know we’ll find him?_

“I know, _girl_ ,” said Able.

Iris didn’t seem to believe him. _Didn’t you get your hair stuck in a coffee grinder one time? I’m not sure you’re the sharpest knife in the drawer._

Able scowled. The coffee grinder incident had been one in a long list of humiliations he’d suffered during his time collared like a dog, obediently taking the Foundation’s orders.

“That was not my fault!”

_What about when you wouldn’t shower for so long that you started distracting your teammates with the stench of rotting blood and the staff had to lure you into a decon chamber to spray you down?_

He remembered that. He remembered how they’d told him he smelled like death, but it had been with a note of admiration. He remembered how he and his team had all gotten rip-roaring drunk after a particularly successful mission and he’d done push-ups with three men crouching on his back to their drunken hollers of encouragement. He’d drunk a whole handle of whiskey at their urging and blacked out for six hours and woken up naked in the walk-in freezer. The kitchen staff had been too terrified to disturb him, so they’d had to stop serving food until he woke up and staggered out on his own.

Something twisted unpleasantly behind Able’s sternum. It was very close to being another feeling. Disgusting. It triggered the appearance of another memory, this one Iris’s: of her boyfriend, a gap-toothed boy in grey jeans. He smiled as he played guitar. Badly, but only for her. Able could not fathom what these memories had in common, but they both made his chest ache with what could only be indigestion. 

Able shook his head. Being in Iris’s body was far worse for his mental state than he could have anticipated. It was confusing, the shifting tides of thought, the dissolution of his usual single-minded state. He was also coming to the uncomfortable realization that, just as he could see into Iris’s mind, Iris could see into his. That was not good. There were things in there that hid in the dark, things he’d buried, things she was picking at with her little fingers. That was why she was a good soldier: she was subtle, like a fine-edged knife.

_Did you really kill them just to mess me up, or was it also because...you were afraid you were starting to like them?_

Iris, prying again. Her question poured gasoline on a flame. For the next hour, he walked as fast as he could, heaving with exertion, on the cusp of throwing up from pure rage. She seemed to realize that she’d touched something terrible, because she was finally, mercifully silent. Her mind wandered. She was thinking of her friends, the ones he’d dispatched. Their faces, the things they’d said. It was difficult not to watch, there was so little to look at in the most rural part of Nevada. 

She thought of the time they’d camped in Oregon on a job. They’d built a fire and crowded around it. The mood was uncharacteristically light. She turned her head, searching out Able - she always wanted to keep one eye on him. He sat a few feet away, his chin in his hand. It was an uncharacteristically relaxed posture. Their eyes met, and for a moment there was something almost like approval on his face. Able didn’t remember this. He wondered how much Iris’s thoughts colored the memory. She noticed that he was following the lead of her thoughts.

 _You were different then_ , Iris said. _Things were almost good. For a while there we thought they were going to keep getting better._

“Foolish,” said Able. “Especially for soldiers. To claim to know my mind...”

 _I know_ , said Iris. _Sentimentality wins sometimes._

Able stopped, cracked his neck. “He’s there.” He didn’t need to point.

There was a dilapidated old house nestled into the hills nearby. The path of dead grass they were following led right to it. There was no way he didn’t know how vulnerable he was.

_He’s not trying to hide._

“No,” Able agreed. It was impossible to tell whether the building was old or whether Cain’s poisonous touch had ruined it. As he made his way up the hill, he wondered whether Cain was afraid. Probably not. But he would relish the look in his eyes when he throttled him, that pain and regret. He wanted to hurt him. More than anything, that was what he wanted. That desire had dragged him across miles of desert in the heat, pulling him like a moth to a flame. Cracked his heels, burnt his skin. Ate and ate and ate at him.

_I don’t think even you believe that you actually want to keep doing this._

“It does not matter,” Able said. “It is never going to stop.” He stopped speaking then. Any surprise he might have had would be lost if he loudly alerted the betrayer to his presence. 

Climbing, climbing. There was the car, parked to the side. No other signs of life, but he was there. Able could feel it, like a cold veil that hung about the place. He paused before climbing the porch, a hot breeze whipping his hair (her hair) around his face. The sun was beginning to set. Able turned to look out over the horizon. When he was a young man, he’d liked to watch the sunsets from the hills with his supper wrapped in cloth, hard cheese and chickpea bread. There was not much to see here, no orchards or streams. In the distance, a road.

 _You could just keep going that way. We could go into the city._ The dreams that she’d had when she’d agreed to lend him her body. Perhaps she would be able to reclaim her body, and if not, perhaps she would be able to establish an equal partnership, and if not, perhaps she would be able to kill him. That last surprised him.

 _You don’t care to live that much,_ he observed.

 _Neither do you,_ said Iris. _But we could try it._

_No._

_Fine. Be a slave_ , Iris said. _Go on and be a slave if you want it so much. Just keep doing what He wants. And what the Foundation wants. Just pummel Cain and get back in your little box. You were free for eight hours. Good job._

Able turned and climbed the steps, seething. They creaked, but held firm. The door was blackened with rot and hung off its hinges. Able pulled until there was a crack, and then dropped it to the side. 

He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking disheveled but calm.

“ _Silim, šeš_ ,” he said. Able realized that he spoke their mother-tongue with a faint accent now, an American one. It repulsed him viscerally, that corruption.

“Will you stand and face me?” Able asked. As always, speaking in Sumerian was a relief. He greatly preferred it to English. “Or must I strike you where you sit, bowing your head like a dog for its master?”

Cain tilted his head. 

 _Coward,_ Iris hissed. _Don’t do it._

“Does Iris live?” Cain asked.

“She does.”

“Can she hear me?”

“She can.”

_For once in your horrible life, just think! Tell them all to fuck off! Don’t just- just shackle yourself to this stupid, useless grudge!_

"How did you get her to recreate the sigils?"

"It doesn't matter. You deserve this."

Cain flinched, and there was genuine pain there: he must have cared for the girl, at least a little. How strange that must be. "She doesn't deserve it," he said.

 _You are such a baby,_ Iris tried.

“How dare you?!” Able said, his veneer of calm cracking. To dismiss his anger, to trivialize what had been done to him... “He beat me to death with a stone while my back was turned!” He balled his hands into fists.

“I did,” said Cain. “And I wish more than anything that I had taken a blade to my own throat instead. Even now, I would give my life for yours if it would take your pain away.” He said it calmly, but with a certain tenderness that made Able even angrier.

"Tell your lies to someone else!" His heartbeat had begun to pound again. Dimly, he was aware that he had done real harm to Iris's body. He didn't care. About anything.

_Everyone can see how much you hate this. That you want it to stop._

“Please. Let Iris go. I’ll help you escape. I swear it. But let her live. Don’t sacrifice her for this.” Cain's pleading was gentle, almost soothing.

"Never," said Able.

_You’re tired. It hurts. You don’t have to keep doing it._

“You have all the time in the world to hurt me. Just this once...wait.”

_Be your own man._

“Enough!” Able grabbed fistfuls of Iris’s hair and pulled, trembling. He hurt. He didn’t know why or how, but he hurt. He couldn’t think with them both yammering at once. And his pulse throbbed in his ears, a constant drumbeat, pounding out years and centuries and millennia of hatred.

_Don’t be a slave._

“My brother,” said Cain. “You were always so willful. Never bowing to anyone. I should have known you would find your way free.” Cain's fingers drummed lightly against his knees.

“Shut up!” Able howled. He cursed, rocking on his feet. He stumbled toward Cain, still clutching his head, and then released Iris’s hair to grab him by the shoulders and drag him to his feet. He slammed him bodily into the wall, which rapidly began to decay, gray dust shaking loose. He shook him. “What do you want from me?! Why always these games?!”

“No games,” Cain said. He reached out and put one hand against Able’s cheek. The metal of his palm was cool. Able jerked his head away in surprise. It was more than he'd been touched in...a very long time. Then Cain pulled something from his coat pocket and presented it. It was a knife, hilt out. “I know you’re beyond change. I know it. But still I hope. Still I keep waiting to see you again.” A slight, sad smile. Tears - Iris’s, certainly - blurred Able’s eyes.

Able shouted. It was a primal, animal sound - a dog with its leg caught in a bear trap. Iris was like needles in his mind. He didn’t know who he hated more: Cain or Iris or Yahweh or himself. It was all a blur of red and black. And there was Cain, Cain with the anger and bitterness filtered out of him over millennia, Cain who had borne his punishment with dignity and grace. The years had made him soft, and gentle, and patient. They had done the opposite to Able. Each time they met, each time they played this out, he was better, kinder. He waited for him with open arms and let Able kill himself with his body. It wasn't fair. He'd watched Cain raise children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and over and over Able had stalked him down and tried to kill the memory of how he himself had once been loved.

Cain frowned. “Don’t cry,” he said. It was the same way he’d said it when they were children and Able had fallen and scraped up his shins. He'd wailed, bloody-kneed, sitting in the grass and refusing to stand until Cain came to the rescue.  _Don’t cry. You must be brave now. Let’s go back home and Ama will clean you up._ Gentle but firm:  _don't cry._

“I’m going to kill you!” He was gripping Cain’s shoulders hard enough that he could feel his own starting to bruise purple-black. He barely noticed the pain.

“No, you’re not,” said Cain. “Hush.” He proffered the knife again, point aimed at his heart. Able released him.

He was shaking hard, and he cursed himself for his weakness. What had Iris done to him? Ruined him, ruined his mind, split him at the seams, brought him here so Cain could flay him open. Was this some plot of theirs, something they'd planned? Of course not. He'd have seen it in Iris's mind. 

 _Go on, then,_ said Iris, sounding resigned.

It didn’t matter, Able realized. Nothing he did mattered. She was right: he was tired. Exhausted. Caked in blood and dirt and shame. He had a thought then, so faint that he himself was not even aware of it, but Iris heard it anyway: _What I am now is something I hate._

“I’m not a slave,” said Able, and slipped out of Iris’s skin like shedding a winter coat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, god! The pathos! I will write Able into a fleshed-out character with actual feelings and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Next chapter: is the last one! Wow!


	9. Broken Circles

Iris woke to find herself face-up on the floor. She didn’t think for a second that the past day had been some horrible dream. She had been through too much in her life to not be aware of the fact that she was painfully anchored in reality. The ceiling above her was made of rotting wooden timbers, and the whole place smelled of damp. The room was lit only by what she determined to be a flashlight pointed at the ceiling.

She was still for a moment, surveying her aches and pains. Her feet hurt. Her shoulders hurt. She was bone-tired and her hair was stuck to her face with dried blood.

“Cain?”

“I’m here.” The voice came after a brief pause.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know.”

Iris sat up to look for him. Her whole body ached. She felt like she’d been thrown down a flight of stairs. The house they were squatting in was clearly long-abandoned and lacked furniture; Cain was sitting across the room on a moldy green blanket. He looked tired, the shadows casting his face in sharp relief. What a sorry state they were in, Iris thought.

“I passed out?” Her voice cracked, and she realized she was terribly thirsty.

“You were extremely dehydrated. You were delirious for a short while after he left you and his abilities weren’t supporting your body anymore. I gave you some water and salt. Then you passed out.”

“Oh,” said Iris. “Do you have any more water?”

Cain pointed to a milk jug that sat next to her and she drank from it gratefully. When she was done, she moved on to the next thing. That was talking. Talk it out. No way around it.

“I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I did something so selfish.”

Cain nodded. “Yes, it was selfish. But people do selfish things when they’re desperate.”

Iris sighed. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t. It was probably the dehydration. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “God. God! People are dead because of me!”

“Yes. That’s something you’ll have to live with.”

“What if I can’t?” Iris’s voice was wobbly. The corner of her mouth twitched.

“You will never be able to hate yourself enough to rewrite history,” said Cain softly, sitting forward. “I would know. What you can do now is grieve. Then you find a way to put some good back into the world.”

Iris shook her head. “Grieve for people I killed?”

“Yes.” Cain stretched his arms above his head, shoulders popping. She wondered how long he had been sitting there; it was solidly night now, and the air was cool. “But, Iris - you didn’t kill them. You played a role, but it was Able’s choice that ended those people’s lives. You put the gun in his hand, but he pulled the trigger. So to speak.”

Iris tried to steady her breathing. Cain was regarding her with his usual calm acceptance. And that was what it was, she realized: not indifference, not coldness, but acceptance. Iris shuffled over on her knees, and then pitched forward and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. Cain rose into an awkward half-crouch to return the hug. He patted her shoulder gently, but she could tell he felt slightly uncomfortable. She drew away quickly. The close contact was weird for her, too.

“I thought maybe I could control him if we were in the same body,” Iris said, settling beside him and drawing her knees up to her chest. “And I couldn’t stand the thought of being locked in that room anymore. I just- I just couldn’t stand it. And I felt like I understood him a little.”

“You did, in a way,” said Cain. “Your influence on him was incredible. It may not have been obvious to you, but he hasn’t been that calm around me in centuries. Ordinarily I can’t get two words out before he attacks me.”

“He felt like I was messing with his head,” said Iris.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Something is different now,” said Iris. 

“Yes,” said Cain. “I felt it, too.”

“What is it?”

“Only time will tell. Maybe...it would be foolish to hope. But maybe this was the first step toward breaking our curse. I do feel lighter.” He didn’t seem any different, but Iris had felt the shift when Able had gone: like a light curtain had been flicked back and something shiny had been revealed underneath. Iris knew what it felt like when reality shifted. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt the universe rewrite itself around her.

“What happened?” Iris asked. 

Cain thought for a moment. “He made a different choice.”

“Just like that? Don’t you ever think it’s too late?” Iris was hugging her knees, rocking slightly. The house creaked, and she half wondered if it was about to collapse on top of them.

“I don’t believe there’s such a thing as being beyond redemption. I will wait for him, however long it takes. You gave me a gift today, Iris, even though the cost was great.” Iris realized, with some surprise, that she could remember how Cain had pulled a thorn out of Able’s foot once, exasperated but fond. And always tending, always leading. When had that stopped?

“That was your idea of a gift?” Iris said.

“It was difficult,” he admitted, “but I saw that my brother is still alive. He may be consumed by madness, but there is a part of him…” he trailed off. Iris understood. She’d felt it when she’d shared a mind with him, the piece of his heart he hadn’t been able to kill. It was tiny and ugly, but there it was: a feeling thing under all that hatred.

“What do we do now?” Iris asked. She realized she was shivering.

Cain got to his feet. “Firstly, we leave. I’m surprised we haven’t been located yet. We’ve been in one place too long.” He glanced around as if expecting a containment team to leap out of the walls.

Iris thought again of the overlapping lines that made up reality being pulled apart and neatly tucked back together.

“Where do we go?” asked Iris. “I’m dead as far as my family is concerned. We can’t ever go back.” She looked down at her hands for the first time and saw that the scars had melted away, healed by the force of nature she’d captured. There was still blood everywhere, tacky and cracking. She could even smell the salt-rust of it. Not all of it was hers.

“I can get you to the nearest city and help you find papers. I have contacts in many places,” said Cain. “It won’t be easy to hide, but it’s doable.”

“What about you?” asked Iris. The thought of being separated from him made her nervous.

“That much is easy,” said Cain, pulling on the gloves he’d tugged out of his back pocket. “I go to rescue my little brother. After all, I did make a promise.”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess this ending is kind of cliffhangery and I'm sorry. I did always intend to leave it like this. I am maybe going to write a second part that's lighter in tone and deals with the three of them. Thank you so, so much to everyone who left comments or kudos. It kept me motivated!


End file.
